The Hunters: Two Short Novels by Claire Messud

Biography

Claire Messud was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Her novels, When the World Was Steady and The Hunters were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor's Choice at The Village Voice. All three of her books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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.

Feature Interview

What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
My goodness - as above, it seems impossible to whittle down the great library of books I've loved to a mere ten. The trouble with lists is that they're always about what's being left out. But here are a few that come to mind...in no particular order:

ZENO'S CONSCIENCE by Italo Svevo - because its absurd dark humor seems to me to capture something very true about life; and its slightly meandering, lumpy structure delights me, who am the sort of person who makes tidy piles of everything.

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY by Henry James - because I've loved it since first I read it, and loved it completely differently upon rereading it. I'm entranced by James's understanding of the human heart, enthralled by the capaciousness and ultimate clarity of his sentences, and a sucker for his melodramatic plots.

ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy - as above, because I've loved it every time I've read it. Because I have a terrible memory, but scenes from this novel, and even small details, stay with me over time with intense vividness. Nobody can choose the significant detail like Tolstoy; and nobody understands better the intertwining of the banal and the profound. I think of the moment when Kitty comes to visit Anna, and notices that Anna's maid has a more stylish hairdo than Kitty does herself: it's a small, vain thing for her to notice, but it's so true, and it speaks volumes.

DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME by Anthony Powell - why pick one book, when you can get 12 for the price of one? I remember reading sections of this epic aloud to my sister, and we laughed so hard we had tears running down our faces. When we stopped laughing, she said "Doesn't it seem a little strange to write 12 volumes of something quite so...light?" The fact is, Powell's touch is light, but also piercingly true, with the result that he captures an entire British class and generation with the precision of a Leica. And, of course, there's the laughing...

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ALICE MUNRO - If you haven't read Alice Munro, then I can't explain to you what is so perfect about her work. If you have read her, you don't need me to tell you. Her vision is dark, but of a crystalline clarity. It has been said of her - perhaps by Cynthia Ozick? - that she is our Chekhov; and it's absolutely true. She chronicles, without show or fuss, the lives of ordinary Canadians; she knows her world to bedrock, and her people to their innermost core. And she writes with a startling, beautiful lucidity.

MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert - Ah, you knew it had to be among the ten. Because I, who have such a terrible memory, have so many impeccably detailed scenes from this book emblazoned in my mind; and because the tragic banality of Emma's story reflects so poignantly the tenor of so many of our bourgeois lives. Because Gustave knew that specificity was all; and knew, too, as he once said, that the writer must be in his work as God is in nature: everywhere but invisible.

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard. You may think this crabby Austrian is unapproachable - and he wants you to think so, with his long sentences, his refusal to paragraph, his hectoring narrators, and, in some cases, his whopping tomes. But there are a number of less daunting Bernhard volumes, and THE LOSER is one of them. It's about a failed musician who studied alongside Glenn Gould, and in so doing realized that being terrific isn't enough, if you're not a genius. It's about ambition, and failure, and how you create a sense of self, and what happens when you fail to do so, or can do so only in relation to someone else. It's black, but funny, and so very true. I'd also recommend WITTGENSTEIN'S NEPHEW, while I'm at it.

BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann. I grant that there are a lot of 19th century novels on this list. It's because I love the fullness of them, and the richness of them, and because, somehow,l they must have formed my idea of what a novel is. I'm a great believer in pleasure, as a reader, and learning about people, and about society, is to me a great pleasure. In BUDDENBROOKS, written when Mann was alarmingly young (25, maybe?), he provides a fabulous portrait not only of a grand family in decline, but of the world they inhabit, too. And it relates to all sorts of other books I love, too - Fontane's EFFIE BRIEST, and by extension, weirdly, to Beckett's play KRAPP'S LAST TAPE. Go figure.

OSCAR & LUCINDA by Peter Carey - I read and loved this book when it came out twenty years ago, and then read it again to teach it, more recently. The first reading transformed me into a die-hard Peter Carey fan, and upon rereading I knew why: because nobody creates fully imagined, slightly fantastical, completely absorbing worlds in the way that Carey can. It is like entering a marvelous dream; or rather, in this case, two marvelous dreams that conjoin, eventually. And although the ending is sad, it's also extraordinary, and beautiful, and funny - so much so, that you'd be forgiven for forgetting, for a moment, that it's sad.

IN A FREE STATE by V.S.Naipaul - Okay, it's a toss-up for me whether I choose A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, or IN A FREE STATE, by Naipaul. They're very different in tone -- Biswas is a black comedy, tender and delightful, of a rare compassion for its hapless protagonist. IN A FREE STATE, which is a novella and stories, is a much darker book. But the novella that lends the book its title is remarkable in its deft efficiency, in its vividness and complexity. It is, in its form, perfect and forceful - and again, searingly memorable.

What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
I don't listen to music when I'm writing, or not on purpose. I have pretty eclectic tastes, and perhaps because my husband has tremendous musical knowledge, I'm always aware of being an amateur. But I love Chopin and Debussy in particular, and I've listened to The Who since I was 10 years old, and I have particular affection for The Eurythmics and Annie Lennox. I'm also a great sentimentalist, and a fan of Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel. I like Amy Winehouse, on the newer front. Earlier this year, I heard a Pulp song called "Common People", about 10 years after it was a hit, and played it over & over for weeks, as if I were 15 years old.

If you had a book club, what would it be reading -- and why?
If I had a book club, it would be to prompt me to read books that I wish I'd already read, or feel the need to talk about with other people. Because of that, I think I'd have a book club that read classics, and literary biographies. I might start with Tristram Shandy, because I've tried on my own at least 5 times and never managed to get to the end. I'd be hoping that peer pressure would force the issue. And if that worked, we might move on to Finnegan's Wake.

What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Books that I love, or that the person giving me the book, loves. A book like that is a very personal gift - it's like passing on a small piece of your soul. We all love different books, because they speak to us personally, in a particular moment in our lives, or because of some detail about our histories; and in giving them to someone, we're sharing a great intimacy. That doesn't at all mean that the book will affect the recipient in the same way, of course; but the sharing itself is a kind of trust, and an adventure.

Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
In some ways, I'm pretty flexible about the whole thing - I can write in a café, if the music isn't too loud, & I can write very happily in bed, or on the sofa or at the dining room table. My desk is in fact the place I'm least likely to write. I'm very particular, though, about the pens I use, and the paper. I always write on French graph paper - usually Rhodia pads, the kind with yellow card covers; and I use a black felt tip with a very fine point. With the right pen & the right paper, I'm all set.

What are you working on now?
That'd be telling.

Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take foryou to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
I've been writing since I was a child, but I wrote my first novel - When The World Was Steady - in my early and mid-twenties. I was living in Britain at the time, and the book was first published there - I was very lucky, I think, to be living in the UK, where editors actually answered your correspondence, and even spoke to you on the phone, sometimes. I don't imagine I would've been published at all, if I'd been in the USA. My first novel was published in a very old-fashioned way - a tiny advance, no expectations, a few reviews, no sales. It was a blessing; but also made me realize that publication, while wonderful, changed very little in my life. I still needed to earn a living, most people still thought I was simply unemployed, and my sister-in-law told me, for years, that I was just jealous of J.K. Rowling. There seemed little point trying to explain that I wasn't trying to write Harry Potter books.

I think one of the most inspiring moments, for me, along the way, was the day on which my agent had hoped for an auction of one of my novels, but none of the ten publishers was interested. He is a man of great wisdom and experience, and has been the agent to far, far more significant writers than me - to many of the greats of the last century, in fact. On that day, he said to me, very calmly, "Ah, but Beckett was also very hard to sell." Even to have him suggest, in the most oblique terms, that I was engaged in the same enterprise as Beckett, made it all okay. It reminded me that it's not about the publishers, or the money, or the sales - it's about the work itself. And I'm sure Beckett was very hard to sell, too.

What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Don't look to be discovered, would be my advice. Don't worry about the other folks. Write what you have to write, with as much honesty, passion, and skill as you possibly can; and then leave it up to the world to discover you or not. Because you can spend your whole life trying to please other people in the hope of achieving some kind of success, and never achieve it; and then all you will have done is betrayed your own vision and your happiness. I always think of Schopenhauer, whose masterpiece THE WORLD AS WILL & REPRESENTATION was published to no acclaim at all - indeed, to no attention at all. He spent the next thirty-five years certain that his moment would come; and eventually, indeed, it did. If it hadn't, we might think he was a madman or a loser; but the fact is, he would always have remained true to himself and to his vision; and you can't hope for more than that.