An Israeli woman relocates to America on assignment from her tech company. In an attempt to leave her past behind and adapt entirely to the new culture in which she finds herself, she joins her colleagues on a deer hunt, discovering a surprising acumen for the sport. She fires again and again, refining her skills with every shot. As she embarks on an affair with her hunting guide and colleague, David, she sinks deeper into hunting season, vacillating between predator and prey as the boundaries between man, woman, work, and nature begin to collapse. Hunting with David becomes the one stable aspect of her life until one day everything changes.
A study in cultural absorption: how violence enters the body and rewires the mind ... The rifles gleam and the deer bleed, but Hunting in America is a workplace novel at heart ... The language of the hunt bleeds easily into the language of productivity: targets, headcounts, eliminations. Joanna Chen’s translation preserves these cold-blooded cadences ... The recoil of the past two years rattles through its silences, its evasions and deferrals, its blind spots and cruelties. There is a shot the woman takes – alone, in the snow – that has ugly consequences. The question that haunts her is whether she meant to take it. That same irresolvable question haunts this novel.
Haunting ... With restrained and beautiful prose, Hakimi spins an intoxicatingly strange tale about an Israeli woman relocating to America ... Hakimi is an accomplished poet, which is evident in her mastery of imagery. The novel will be accessible to more readers thanks to Joanna Chen’s expert translation into English ... Through her careful storytelling, Hakimi deftly weaves in complex themes of alienation, perspective, desire, disconnection, and the normalization of violence.
Provocative ... Told differently, the novel could be a classic noir, but Hakimi keeps the reader on their toes with the narrative’s disarming obliqueness and ambiguity, all the way to the final crack of a gunshot. This tantalizes.
