This Strange Eventful History (2024)

Why this one?

This is another 2024 Booker Longlist selection. Despite seeing a few mixed comments on this, I can never resist a good old grand historical sweep, especially one exploring postwar Europe, so despite having never read Claire Messud before, I had to give this a go.

Claire Messud (1966- ; active 1995- ) was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, US. Her mother is Canadian, and her father was born in French Algeria (a 'Pied-noir', or descendant of the Europe population who had colonised Algeria and mostly departed it during or after the 1962 war of independence). She studied at both Yale and Cambridge.

Her debut novel, 1995's When The World Was Steady, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second, The Last Life (1999) addressed themes relating to her French-Algerian ancestry that she would return to over her career. The Emperor's Children (2005) was a commercial success as well as being longlisted for the 2006 Booker. She has continue to publish regularly alongside lecturing, most recently at Harvard where she is part of the Creative Writing faculty.

Thoughts, etc.

This Strange Eventful History covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars, from 1940 to 2010. It begins with a couple of maps that highlight key locations in the novel, alerting us early on to a recurrent theme of the novel, that of dislocation and a lack of a discernable 'home', for a community (of which Messud herself is a direct descendant) represented by the novel's central family.

Its first section also gives clues as to the novel's structure. Its focus is Gaston Cassar, a French-Algerian based in Greece as the Germans take Paris in 1940. As the action builds, and Cassar listens to De Gaulle's radio broadcast calling on the French to fight on, the chapter ends and we abruptly jump past the entirity of the War and land over a decade later in the 1950s. While history shapes the characters and events of the novel, its major events are rarely its focus.

The next major event to be skipped entirely, but that irrevocably alters the course of the Cassar family's history is, of course, the 1962 Algerian war of independence. Already made refugees by the Second World War, the Cassars are again forced to leave their land of birth (which they have grown up to believe is simply a part of France) and subsequenty scatter across the globe. Gaston and his wife Lucienne end up in South America (with their daughter Denise, who has an entertaining section over there involving meeting various literary greats, having her sexuality questioned and developing an unhealthy obsession with an unattainable man) before retreating to the French mainland to live out their years. Their son Francois moves to the US to study, visits Cuba in another memorable episode, and picks up a Canadian wife, Barbara.

It is one of their daughters, Chloe, who doesn't arrive until relatively late in the book, who is the obvious proxy for Messud herself. While the novel is told from many perspectives, Chloe's is the only one in the first person, and through it she becomes the effective 'author' of a version of Claire's own family history. For Chloe, like Claire, this begins with the receipt of an enormous manuscript, written by her grandfather (Gaston in the novel) detailing the history of her family, and sitting on it for decades before being able to fully absorb it.

Messud's interests in writing this wide-ranging history are clearly many and varied. There's obviously a deeply personal urge to explore the unique personalities that populate her own family history. Events in the book such as Chloe's discovery of her father swigging illicit gin from the bottle in a side-room at a family gathering can only have been born of personal experience. All of the characters in the book are brilliantly drawn and are central to what keeps this such a compelling page-turner of a book.

At a broader level, though, the core of the book (while deliberately avoiding descriptions of some of the more generalised aspects of the history) is about the experience of a people dislocated - through no fault of their own, but perhaps of their ancestors - by the failure of the colonial project. It's an interesting perspective and one that is bound to wind up a few people - this is a book that covers very little of the experience of the historical peoples of Algeria, but nor does it profess to. In one memorable scene, Gaston and a very righteous Chloe debate the colonial history of Algeria - for the former, Chloe's anger at the French colonists is seen as outsized mainly because of the failure of their 'project' - in contrast to those of other European colonisers in, for example, the USA and Australia, where he sees Chloe's generation turning a blind eye because the colonisers' project 'succeeded'. Deep and divisive issues, and perhaps not fully resolved by this one book - but then could they ever be?

It's the trajectory of the specific characters that make the book though. The different generations demonstrate different reactions to their general sense of lost identity, from Gaston and Lucienne's haunted stoicism, to the varying forms of escapism from reality explored by the next generation down (Francois and Denise) and the distanced intellectualism of the grandchildren. Ultimately, the overriding sense is that as the family's story slips further into the past, it becomes harder for subsequent generations to understand their connection to those key (importantly elided in the book, as if representing their loss to time) moments in their history. The manuscript, as well as being the literal basis for Messud's excellent novel, is also a metaphor for the scale of the challenge facing modern readers in coming to terms with the weight of history - and once it is tackled, unexpected and challenging surprises (like the one we end with about Gaston and Lucienne's relationship) will doubtless be uncovered.

Score

9

I thought this was an incredibly readable, hard to put down book, despite its length and the complexity of the issues it addresses. On the surface it’s just a really well-told family history, but under that there’s a lot more to consider. I’d love to see this one make the shortlist - it’s certainly a worthy contender.

Next up

Samantha Harvey’s rather shorter Orbital.