Claire Messud opens “This Strange Eventful History” with a prologue that announces, “I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.” That may sound pretentious — she’s just a writer, after all — but it’s prophetic, an aspiration wholly borne out by this monumental novel, which is a work of salvage and salvation.
Claire Messud turns her family’s history into a masterpiece
“This Strange Eventful History” is a novel that’s quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades.
Review by Ron Charles
May 10, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
As the title suggests, though, it’s not exactly a novel — or not only a novel. Rather than being cut from whole cloth, “This Strange Eventful History” is quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades. To a certain extent, the project began with a 1,500-page memoir written out by Messud’s paternal grandfather, who was born in what was once French Algeria. Now, after a lifetime of reflection, Messud has published a book that imagines how three generations of the Cassar family rode the geopolitical waves from World War II into the 21st century.
Literary spelunkers may expect the voyeuristic thrill of climbing through the life of the author who wrote “The Emperor’s Children,” “The Woman Upstairs” and other terrific novels, but there are treasures here far beyond the merely autobiographical. The names have been changed, and the copyright page warns nosy readers that “all characters, events, and incidents have been fictionalized.” Isn’t that the case, though, with anyone’s family history? We all live and move and have our being in a discombobulated library of familial tales that get more dubious the further they deviate from what we need to be true.
Halfway through “This Strange Eventful History,” Messud’s avatar, Chloe Cassar, makes her first appearance as an anxious, exceedingly precocious third-grader in Sydney. Though only 7 years old, she already knows “we must all pretend that we aren’t stepping, each day, along a tightrope over a fire-filled gorge that would at any instant swallow us.” Rising in the middle of the night to watch over her family, she says, “I was the storyteller, and made the stories end happily.”
Clearly, Messud clung to her early avocation while abandoning that editorial prescription. These stories rarely end happily — in fact, they rarely end at all. Instead, the peripatetic chapters jump around the world as old assumptions about national identities are challenged and long-held dreams are thwarted. The members of the Cassar family are like magnets separated only by the centrifugal force of history, constantly drawn back together whenever the opportunity arises.
The novel opens in 1940 as the Germans invade Paris. Gaston Cassar is a French naval attaché in Greece. Racing to stay ahead of the approaching horror, he recently sent his family back to Algeria but can’t be certain they’ve made it. Although he writes every night to his beloved wife, Lucienne, he hears nothing in return. “Lucienne was his anchor, but now he had to rely on himself,” the narrator writes. “What am I? he asked the empty sitting room, the dripping night: What am I for? And the litany that he and Lucienne had more than once recited together returned to him: I am Mediterranean, I am Latin, I am Catholic, I am French. These, then, were his anchors; these things, a priori and immutable, defined him.”
Alas, one generation’s anchors will become a new generation’s flotsam. Even as Gaston worries about the safety of his family, his 8-year-old son, François, is struggling to locate his identity on a world map that’s aflame. “This was where his family belonged,” his parents insist. “‘Here’ was France — Algeria of course, but Algeria was France — and this was home, apparently.” How poignant that “apparently” is, how fraught already with colonial presumption and revolutionary portent.
A decade later, young François is at Amherst College on a Fulbright scholarship, feeling alternately thrilled and lonely. His American fraternity brothers are like children, the narrator notes, “good guys, without irony or malice — if also without worldly perspective or understanding.” Their casual racism is passed off as a species of friendship. They regard François — their token “Ay-rab” — as “a (mostly) white colonial African from that mysterious terrain across the Mediterranean. … He was completely indecipherable.”
As the decades pass and the Cassars continue to traverse the planet, their accomplishments and miseries accrue, but each section plunges us into a new setting with a cold-water shock of disorientation. Indeed, this is a novel that feels consciously designed to punish inattention. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and friends are all tangled in a giant game of cat’s cradle played out over several continents.
Committed to an unhappy marriage, François struggles to fulfill his father’s concept of success while repressing his own artistic longings. His brilliant younger sister clings forever to their parents under the guise of caring for them. And all along, Gaston and Lucienne’s marriage — despite the 13-year age difference — is polished by the family to a high sheen, a pearl formed around a grain of scandal. The real tragedy, though, is that their union becomes an unmatchable fantasy — “the masterpiece of our lives” — that casts their offspring’s romantic prospects in a permanent shadow of disappointment.
As Chloe gets older, goes to college and meets a smart young man (with the vague outlines of New Yorker book critic James Wood), she grows more curious about her conflicted parents, her disturbed aunt, her kindly French grandparents and the compromises that accumulate with deadly effect like lead in the kidneys. Every character here is explored with extraordinary skill and sympathy, but François, based on the long, complicated life of Messud’s father, is her most exquisite creation. She has carved him with unsparing insight while cradling him with affection; she acknowledges his unceasing toil without excusing his corrosive self-pity. It’s a portrait on the razor’s edge between bitterness and sentimentality without falling into either. “He wanted to be seen,” the narrator says. Now he is.
Regardless of how much Messud may have drawn from biographical details, though, this novel grips our interest only because of how expertly she shapes these incidents for dramatic effect. She’s been praised for her Jamesian pursuit of psychological realism, but that suggests armchair reflection. Here, Messud sifts through characters’ lives like a squad of police officers with a warrant. She puts such pressure on her sentences that the rules of grammar shatter and concede to her demands. She can capture the panicked mind of a woman realizing that the love of her life was an illusion or a crowd gossiping at a 50th-anniversary party. At its most magnificent, her phrasing isn’t merely long-winded or syntactically complex, it’s tireless, racing to snatch lives from the sands of time.
“This Strange Eventful History” is a novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
This Strange Eventful History
By Claire Messud
W.W. Norton. 428 pp. $29.99
