Alan's Bookshelf

As mentioned on the homepage, I envision this as an "Alan Recommends" page--though I will certainly leave room for other reactions. If the author is fairly modern (i.e. has their own web page) you can click on their name and be directed right there. I hope to edit this page regularly, so check back often!

The Hunters

by Claire Messud

The Hunters Book CoverAnother Sewanee writer (once the conference is over I’ll go back to reading non-Sewanee folks, I swear), Claire Messud has written an understated, deceptively simple pair of novellas entitled The Hunters, and while each story is strong individually, they are even stronger paired with one another.

The first piece, “A Simple Tale”, is about a housekeeper named Maria Poniatowski, and the “fragmentary” lives she lives after immigrating from forced servitude in the Ukraine, and trying to embed herself into her new life as the world changes around her. The second piece, “The Hunters”, is about a young academic living in Britain for a summer, and her awkward but compelling encounters with her downstairs neighbors. The stories are different but complementary. In “A Simple Tale” we finish knowing almost everything about the main character’s history; in “The Hunters” we know almost nothing save for the particulars of one season (on other subjects the narrator is defiantly silent). “A Simple Tale” covers fifty years of war, estrangement, aging and heartbreak; “The Hunters” covers one death, and this mostly in speculative terms. The protagonist in each work is set apart from her environment—rather by choice, circumstance, or both—and even the supporting players, though they may desire connection, are handicapped by the extent to which they cannot ever truly know one another, and the ways in which they cling to their inner lives and secrets, which grant strength even as they isolate. Even the most intimate relationships—to spouses or caregivers—survive by what they withhold in addition to what they share. Taken together then, these two novellas—ninety pages each—explore the lives of exiles, and the extent to which individuals are ever capable of integrating themselves into the lives of others, as well as the extent to which they should even desire to do so. If this sounds like a downer . . . it is, in a way. But the characterization in these stories is remarkable—especially since we ultimately know so little about so many of the people. Messud’s prose is lovely and lucid, and The Hunters is certainly a worthwhile read.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jun 29, 03:08 PM.
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