The Hunters [NOOK Book]


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The Hunters

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Editorial Reviews

A phenomenally controlled tour de force.
San Francisco Chronicle
Haunting and evocative.
New York Review of Books
Remarkable . . . Messud has written a very serious book-always original, intense and gripping.
Library Journal
The reader gets two for the price of one in this volume of novellas. The first piece, "A Simple Tale," is the story of Maria Poniatowski. Maria was born in the Ukraine and survived World War II in German slave labor camps. Put in a displaced persons camp at the end of the war, she meets her husband, Lev, and together they decide to relocate to Canada to start a new life and raise their young son, Radek. Maria struggles to find her place in the world, first as a cleaning woman, then as a widow. A gap forms between her and Ron, as her son now calls himself, because Maria disproves of his wife, who in Maria's words is not a nice girl. In the second piece, "The Hunters," a nameless English professor is researching death during a dreary summer in London. Alone and depressed, the narrator eliminates most human contact, until the downstairs neighbor, Ridley Wandor, knocks on the apartment door. The narrator becomes enthralled with Ridley, a home health aide, and her tales of a sick mother whom no one ever sees, patients who die with alarming frequency, and a horde of pet rabbits. Both novellas illustrate the frustration of human relations, loneliness, and the veracity of personal histories. Messud's (The Last Life) short novels are well written, intense examinations of isolation that will appeal to readers of literary fiction. Recommended for larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/01.] Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Forgive Messud (The Last Life, 1999, etc.) for subtitling this set of novellas "two short novels," and reject the impulse to make sense of the juxtaposition of two beautiful tales of people contending with solitude: each story succeeds in standing alone. Maria, protagonist of "A Simple Tale," discovers blood-streaked walls at the home of Mrs. Ellington, a woman she's cared for every Tuesday for 46 years. Maria expects the gruesome, but the old woman's real plight triggers in Maria a flashing-before-her-eyes recollection of her own whole life, starting as a girl in pre-WWII Ukraine, moving to camps in Germany when the war arrives, and eventually raising an American-style family and growing old in Canada. Maria is a homebody akin to Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge—she takes guilty pleasure in a teacup left dirty overnight—and her story spills out, sadly and expertly, in one long breath of history and well-earned nostalgia, and Maria discovers that having a story is as important as telling one. "The Hunters" plays a coy game by withholding the gender of a lovelorn American academic studying death in a disappointing London apartment for a summer. Messud recalls Henry James by sometimes opting for the pretty word over the perfect word (and she loves parentheses), and the story's plot and subject echo those of The Aspern Papers. Sexless and nameless, the character is as difficult to reference as to pin down: the main action occurs when a downstairs neighbor, a gnomish woman named Ridley Wandor, who just happens to care for the terminally ill, repeatedly imposes unwanted friendship on the scholar, who in turn becomes obsessed with finding something evil behind her veil offriendliness. But beyond the screen is only a misplaced distrust and another lesson on how to be human and alone. As smart as they are affecting, these stories aren't novels: it's in their brevity that they loom so large.
From the Publisher
"A phenomenally controlled tour de force."-VOGUE
"Haunting and evocative."—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"Remarkable . . . Messud has written a very serious book-always original, intense and gripping."—THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780547563879
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: 8/26/2002
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 192
  • Sales rank: 749,092
  • File size: 351 KB

Meet the Author

Claire Messud


Author biography courtesy of Random House

Good To Know

1. As a child in Australia, I wore a school uniform that included a hat on my head and the color of my underpants. If you had long hair, you had to wear it up, with grey ribbons. You weren't allowed to take your hat off in public, or to eat in public in uniform. It all sounds very draconian, but I loved it. I think my abiding interest in knowing rules, and breaking them, comes from those early days. I'm a big believer in rules - like grammar, for example. If you know the rules of grammar, it's fine to break them. If you don't know the rules, and break them by mistake, people can usually tell...
2. We have, in our family, a dachshund named Myshkin. She's middle aged, short-haired, red and a little portly, but very delicious, with soulful eyes. It may not seem kind to have named her after Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of Dostoevksy's THE IDIOT; but she's an idiot in the best possible sense: an innocent. There's no guile in her. That said, she's spectacularly greedy, and only last night grabbed a piece of sushi off my husband's plate when he wasn't looking. When I was a child, we had two dachshunds, uncle and nephew, named Big and Small. They were quite particular and temperamental, which I thought was great. When we were looking for a dog, I persuaded my reluctant husband that we should have a dachshund by pointing out that as a breed, they were crabby and discriminating - as well as animals which, on account of their physiques, have a strong understanding of the absurdity of life. As it turned out, Myshkin is a complete pushover, as undiscriminating as they come, and stops and wags her tail for strangers in the street.
3. I don't keep a diary. I believe, in principle, that one should; but after re-reading 10 year old entries in horror, and discovering that my reflections and preoccupations had changed not at all in the course of my entire adult life, I gave up writing any of it down about ten years ago. Now, like my grandfather before me, I'm more likely to note what I had for dinner or what the weather was like in the margins of my date-book than I am to spill forth my innermost thoughts. I'm not sure, at this point, that I have any innermost thoughts.
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    1. Hometown:
      Somerville, MA, USA
    1. Education:

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
When Maria Poniatowski let herself into Mrs. Ellington's apartment at 7:55 a.m. precisely (she was always five minutes early; she timed her walk that way), on the third Tuesday of August in 1993, and saw, straightaway, the trail of blood smeared along the wall from the front hall towards the bedroom, she knew that this was the end.
She had come every Tuesday morning-vacations and holidays excepted, and excepting also the still-painful six months in 1991 when Mrs. Ellington had banished her in an inexplicable fit of pique-for forty-six years. She had come, first, to the house on Laurel Heights, and then, when Mrs. Ellington had decamped to the apartment on Manley Avenue in 1977, Maria had come to her there, without missing a beat. And all, thought Maria, with a sudden flush of tears, for the old woman-she was very old now, ninety-two in fact-to be butchered, unsuspecting, in her home. It was too awful. One read about such occurrences in the newspapers (although Maria, not reading English very well, and so rarely did), or one heard about them on the television. But one did not expect them ever to befall the people that one knew. That's what Maria told herself as she tiptoed along the buff-colored broadloom towards Mrs. Ellington's bedroom.
But in fact she was far more surprised to find Mrs. Ellington snoring softly in her four-poster, propped up by three pillows, her rose satin bed jacket bloodstained but neatly buttoned-far more surprised than she would have been to discover a mangled corpse. Mrs. Ellington's eyes, the milky blue eyes that could no longer see, fluttered open as Maria drew near, and strove, in vain, to focus.
"Is that you? Is that you, Maria?"she asked, her high, brittle voice tinged with panic.
"It's me, Mrs. Ellington," Maria reassured her. "What's been happening here, Mrs. Ellington?"
But Mrs. Ellington, having established the identity of her visitor, slipped swiftly into ill humor. "Dammit," she muttered. "What time is it? That bloody clock. I've overslept. It must be eight. I'll get your coffee, Maria, just hold your horses. For heaven's sake, you might give me a minute . . ." The old woman, her fluffed hair pressed flat at the side of her head, her ravaged hands fumbling with the blankets, hauled herself up and swung her feet to the floor. The bed was high-it was Mrs. Ellington's marriage bed-and Mrs. Ellington was small: her feet dangled a few inches above the carpet, sweeping, like divining rods, in search of her slippers. Maria bent and slid the pink mules one at a time over Mrs. Ellington's scaly insteps.
"I'll get your dressing gown, Mrs. Ellington. No hurry. Take your time."
"Every bloody Tuesday," muttered Mrs. Ellington. "I hope the half-and-half is still good," she said more loudly, "because if it's not, you'll just have to have milk."
"Don't worry, Mrs. Ellington. It's a beautiful day outside."
Mrs. Ellington, stumbling past Maria towards the bathroom, merely grunted.When they were, at last, in their usual places in the breakfast nook, their usual coffee (Maria's with half-and-half) on the table before them, the sun streaming in so brightly that Mrs. Ellington's blind eyes blinked, Maria raised the subject of the blood on the wall.
At first, Mrs. Ellington did not seem to understand what Maria was talking about. She pursed her lips (over all her own teeth; she was very proud of her teeth) and shook her head. But then she said, "My finger. I cut my finger making dinner. It was the broccoli. I suppose that's it." She held up her left hand to the side of her head, where a sliver of peripheral vision remained to her, and peered at it in grave concentration. "Dammit, I don't know. It's all a blur, Maria. Will you look at it for me?"
Maria took the arthritic digits between her own hands: their forms were gnarled, and the worn skin was shiny, but Mrs. Ellington's hand was soft and faintly tremulous, like a palpitating bird, in Maria's grasp. On Mrs. Ellington's forefinger there was a long, streaked scab. The cut was quite deep: Maria could tell that if she were to give the finger a sharp squeeze, it would start, again, to bleed.
"This is no good, Mrs. Ellington. How can you manage this way? It's so hard. You need help."
"Aren't you my help?"
Maria went, without replying, to fetch disinfectant and a cotton ball. She sighed. She would have to speak to Mrs. Ellington's daughter. But Judith lived in California, and Maria didn't make long distance calls.
"When is Judith coming?" she asked Mrs. Ellington as she daubed at the finger. "Or Simon? Or Madeleine? Or Kate?"-these were Judith's three children, full-grown themselves, and scattered like chaff across the continent.
"To Toronto?" Mrs. Ellington grimaced, either at the prospect of her descendants gathering or in pain at the stinging of her hand, or both. "Judith said after Labor Day, but I don't know how long after."
"You'll speak to her tonight?" Judith called Mrs. Ellington daily.
"I suppose. If she remembers."
"Of course she remembers." Maria took a deep breath. "Maybe you tell her to call me, ya? I need to talk with her."
"Not about me, you don't," snapped Mrs. Ellington, blinking furiously.
"No, no. Just about things."
Judith was often between them. Maria had known Judith since the latter was fifteen years old. She had witnessed, over the years, many altercations between Mrs. Ellington and her only child, and she had long ago given up trying to take sides. But when Mrs. Ellington-whose general temper had, in recent years, taken a powerful turn for the worse, as if her good humor had evaporated with her eyesight-had summarily dismissed Maria from her employ with an unprecedented shriek over two years previously, it was Judith who had served as a mediator. She had initially apologized on her mother's behalf, had calmed the old woman sufficiently for Mrs. Ellington to apologize herself, and had facilitated Maria's re-entry into the Ellington home. "She can't manage without you, Maria, no matter what she pretends. She's completely lost. I know it's a lot to ask. I know how impossible she is. But if you could find it in your heart-"
And Maria, after six months of empty Tuesdays, almost seventy herself and with no interest in finding a new Tuesday job; after six months in which she had used her newly free time to plant her garden, to paint her kitchen, to re-paper her hall, only then to sit and survey her domestic perfection with irritation and ennui, had capitulated. She had had only two households left on her roster, Mrs. Ellington and Jack McDonald and his wife: she'd worked for Jack's parents until they died, and had cleaved, quite naturally, to their son, although she found Elspeth McDonald's smoking displeasing and could not stand their lumbering Labrador, Sport. So that without Mrs. Ellington, Maria had been lonely. She had missed her fractious employer, and the calm rituals of her workday on Manley Avenue: the leisurely coffee, the chattering radio that Mrs. Ellington played constantly, the swift rhythms of vacuuming and dusting, the changing of the sheets. She had missed the particular smells, of Mrs. Ellington's favorite furniture polish, of her bath salts, and the intimate scents of her faintly musty cupboards; and she had missed their shared lunches, after the work was done, the slow, talk-filled afternoon meal of sandwiches (white bread, crusts trimmed, Bick's yum-yum pickles always in a cut glass dish between them at the table) and Fig Newtons and tea. She'd missed the way Mrs. Ellington's voice would rise when she said, "Cup of tea, Maria?" asking politely each time, although Maria had never once in all those years said no; and she missed even the sound of her own voice saying, "Yes please, Mrs. Ellington," and the pleasure of waiting, with her hands in her lap, for that satisfying moment when Mrs. Ellington, so imperious, poured the boiling tea from the flowered pot into her, Mari
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Reading Group Guide

1. Why does Messud tell us nothing specific about the narrator's gender, age, appearance, or past? How does the lack of these specifics influence the way in which we receive the narrator's impressions and observations?

2. What might explain the narrator's being drawn to "the suggestion of society, without its actual impingement" and the narrator's admitted "carefully controlled existence"? Why does the narrator feel invisible? What are the causes and consequences of this sense of invisibility? At the same time, why has the narrator selected this flat in what Richard Copley later calls "a voyeur's paradise"?

3. What are the roles and consequences of loneliness, isolation and seclusion, and dislocation in "The Hunters"? Are these conditions chosen by the characters, and if so, why; or are they imposed upon the characters, and if so, from what source?

4. Why is Ridley Wandor's very existence, from their first meeting, "irredeemable, heinous, utterly unpardonable" for the narrator? Why is the narrator's one wish that "she would not be," and what are the implications and the consequences of that wish?

5. Who or what are "the hunters," and who or what are the hunted? What variations of the two conditions occur? What transformations from hunted to hunter and vice versa occur?

6. "It was difficult to think of her life as anything but a story," comments the narrator, referring to the discovery of the facts of Ridley Wandor's "story." In what ways does that statement indicate the nature and extent of the narrator's understanding of self and others? What might be the dangers of thinking of anyone's life, including one's own, as "anything but a story"?What might be the relationship between any life and the story of that life?

7. Why is the narrator unable, even when recognizing "the true agony of Ridley Wandor's days," to "believe in the sorrows of others"? Why does the narrator persist in feeling "my sorrows to be by far the greatest, my wounds the source of the only real blood"? What does it take for the narrator and for each of us to accurately perceive and empathize with the sorrows of others?

8. If, as the narrator repeatedly states, "I'm guilty," guilty of what? To what extent might the narrator's guilt be a guilt shared by/with all of us?

Copyright © 2002. Published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Inc
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