The first novella, "A Simple Tale," is the story of a Ukrainian refugee, Maria Poniatowski. The reader might expect to be mired in the dramatic and emaciating events of Maria's past-the journey from her small village, Gulyapole, to the work camps during the war, to the Displaced Persons camp after the war, and finally to freedom in Toronto. However, neither the author nor the protagonist dwells on misery or suffering. The events are quickly and skillfully divulged, but never really placed in time; they are all simply "indistinguishable moments in the war." Maria is, foremost, a housekeeper.
She escapes the war intact and continues on. She marries, speaks only English, has a son and tries to at least ignore, if not forget, the past. All this is achieved without making Maria seem a particularly pitiful character. Indeed, the only mementos that Maria bears of her years of internment are cosmetic: two silver-capped incisors, installed by the handsome dentist at the work camp. This detail adroitly captures her odd mixture of vanity, self-absorption and sadness. Maria is a vulgar but oddly sympathetic character.
"A Simple Tale" is filled with scenes that are so painstakingly conveyed that they resonate with unmistakable truthfulness. Through Maria's stilted interactions with her son, Radek (who insists on being called Rod), Messud provides us with excruciating examples of her discomfort. Over and over, equanimity is restored to Maria's life by the simple and predictable act of being offered tea by her employer of the last 46 years, Mrs. Ellington.
All of the relationships in the book are permeated with an odd distance: "Their way of knowing each other was at once excruciatingly intimate and oddly formal." In spite of the fact that "A Simple Tale" is about imperfections and spaces between people, the writing itself is both ornate and polished. There is a baroque quality to the nearly metered prose.
Ultimately, the dissonance that is so vividly rendered by Messud's attentive eye resolves into a pastoral chord as Maria begins to understand her loneliness. The prose is elegant and carefully wrought, but in the "chinked gloom" that pervades the story, one gets the sense that even though we, the readers, are privy to Maria's thoughts via Messud's intervening pen, we do not know her true voice, with its fragments of German, Russian and English. Both by its narrative technique and plot, "A Simple Tale" suggests much about the complexity of loneliness.
In the second novella, "The Hunters," a garrulous, imaginative and paranoid narrative voice gives shape to the story. In this second work, there is no objective reality-everything is filtered through the obviously skewed perception of the witty, clever and possibly insane narrator. The tone, language and subject matter are completely distinct from "A Simple Tale," although similar themes-loneliness, displacement and isolation-continue to be important.
The narrator is a professor, of undisclosed sex and name, doing research in London for a book about death. In the confines of an apartment ominously situated in the Killburn district, the narrator encounters a rather disgusting woman named Ridley Wandor, who lives downstairs with her elderly mother. This is hardly an unusual event, but in the world of this disembodied narrator, the only thing worth paying attention to is the sordid world of the imagination, since he/she has no other life or acquaintances in London.
"I thought very actively and consistently about my neighbors," confesses the narrator, "and hated them for it."
Ridley Wandor is a caretaker for housebound geriatric patients, and the narrator envisions her as a kind of murderer. The much more ordinary (and much more evocative) truth about Ridley's life provides us with an actual tragedy in the otherwise amorphous and unreal world that the narrator describes.
"The Hunters" is more complex and interesting than the intricate "A Simple Tale." The amorphous voice is charismatic but untrustworthy, raising both the suspicion and interest of the reader. Ultimately, the strange world of this narrator's mind is absorbing. However, we are never released from its spell; the narrator's obsession with his next door neighbors and the outside world never seems finished, the real story in the story never fully examined.
Both stories examine the difficulty of connection. We are stuck in a world afflicted by isolation, whether it is symptomatic of broken connections or paranoid schizophrenia. In the very ordinary act of existing, people are faced daily with the problems of connection, how to be sincere or interested in life without risking damage to themselves. The paradox of being isolated in a world so full of things is beautifully examined in Messud's latest work.
Both stories "open to relief" in the end, perhaps in the unconscious knowledge that the life has been told and can no longer be confined to its "storyness."