Happiness means more than history

Claire Messud's two brilliant novellas are exquisitely positioned: poised, subtle and perfect, they communicate with each other across expanses of silence like works of art. It is almost startling to encounter writing of this quality. Messud is absolutely modern and yet her work has none of the standard traits of contemporary fiction. This is masterly prose - modest, authentic, compassionate, interested and majestically complete.

The first, A Simple Tale, is a life history that incorporates other kinds of history, so that from a single trajectory plotted through the 20th century, Messud creates an extraordinary web of human intersection. It opens with a Toronto cleaning woman's discovery of blood smeared along the wall of her employer's flat. She prepares herself for the old woman's butchered corpse somewhere inside, but it transpires that the blood is the result of a minor accident: Mrs Ellington, in her nineties and nearly blind, cut her finger and spread the blood around without noticing. It is decided that she is no longer capable of living alone and her daughter puts her into a home.

This small series of events provides the occasion for the story of a life to be told, for when Maria Poniatowski, the cleaning woman, discovered the blood she believed that she was witnessing the final triumph of malevolent forces; that the tale of her own survival was about to come to an end. She thought the same thing when her only son married a girl of German ancestry, thereby handing the Germans a bitter, belated victory.

Maria, who grew up in a village in the Ukraine, who was driven nearly to death in a series of labour camps during the war, who lost her family and emigrated to Canada in her early twenties, is both respectful and afraid of this matter of her survival. Mrs Ellington, a few years before the blood incident, lost her temper unaccountably with Maria and screamed abuse at her. Her daughter-in-law Anita abuses her too. Maria's beloved husband, whom she married in the labour camp, died of unexpunged sorrow 20 years before, and her son, although respectful, remains, at his wife's behest, remote. Feeling has come to Maria painfully, like blood returning to a numbed limb: she has lived through violence and death, she has kept her head down and worked hard and survived, only to encounter, finally, the world of emotion. Her passage, towards and through this encounter, represents the story's climax, and Messud orchestrates it breathtakingly, beautifully.

The Hunters takes up the theme, this time in a rented flat in Kilburn, where an emotionally thwarted American academic is spending a summer researching a book. The name, age and gender of this academic are unspecified: the subject of the book is representations of death in literature. The story begins with a series of illusions or misperceptions designed to illustrate the academic's over-wrought, solipsistic and fragile state of mind. He/she is fooled by the landlord's redecorations into thinking that the flat is a place where people have been happy. The world, here, is merely a stage-set for the over-privileged, over-careful consciousness.

At first, the sun shines, the flat is tranquil, the book is progressing; but then the sitting tenants downstairs begin to intrude, bringing with them all that is malign, dark, chaotic. These tenants are a mother and daughter: the mother is never seen, but the daughter, a fat, ugly, middle-aged woman who works as a carer for elderly people, is, for the academic, the bearer of the contagion of unhappiness. He/she subjects these neighbours to Gothic imaginings, becoming convinced first that the daughter is murdering her frail charges, and then that the daughter herself is at risk of being murdered by the mother.

Looking back on this period, the academic sees that he/she was having some sort of emotional breakdown triggered by an ended romance: he/she wants to escape from this cocoon of self-reference but can't, not even when, on a visit some time later to London, it emerges that the daughter is indeed dead, possibly murdered. The academic is in love again, and deliriously happy. This happiness is all that matters - the sphere of fact, of otherness, cannot be reconciled to personal emotion.

These two small masterpieces reflect and compliment one another so as to form something larger, a work of tremendous scope and significance. I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift.