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Ukraine
Literary Fiction
Novels

Books like The Hunters

The Hunters

2003Claire Messud

4.7/5

I'm a newly converted Messud fan. I loved these novellas. Although the stories couldn't be more different, they share a very similar emotional atmosphere: isolation and how we reconcile the part of us that "shows" to those parts of us that are hidden, and can we ever reconcile the two? In telling Maria's story, Messud writes that Maria saw parts of herself reflected in the different people that were in her life (son, employers, acquaintances) and she wasn't sure how all of those reflections could possibly reconciled into a whole. (Read the novella, Messud says it much more eloquently). Maria couldn't possibly reconcile herself. Her experiences in the camps schooled her in survival, but at a cost. In the next novella, the protagonist could not be more different than Maria. S/he is unspecified, we don't know his/her name, sex, can't even decode using the sex of the person's partner. S/he is suffering through a break-up, wants as little contact as possible with anyone, is angsty for no reason other than that's what educated, fairly well-off people do in crisis, struggle with the question of "who am i? is it worth it?" S/he struggles with a reconciliation of self, one much less weighty than Maria's, but a reconciliation all the same.

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