This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that they could, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn, to know.
This Strange Eventful History is “inspired by” the stories of author Claire Messud’s family (she stresses in an afterword that this is a work of fiction, but that “the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own family”), and initially, I thought that that would be fascinating: the novel begins with a mother fleeing with her children back to the Algeria of their birth at the dawn of WWII as her Navy officer husband watches France fall to the Nazis and awaits orders from his diplomatic posting in Greece. There was a nugget of something very interesting in that — a white family whose ancestors had been in Algeria for over a hundred years, and who thought of themselves as 100% belonging there and also 100% French citizens — and after the African country gained independence in 1962, these “pieds-noirs” had to make a home elsewhere in the world (along with the “harkis”: the reviled indigenous Algerians who had fought on the side of France in the war of independence), and this was a history I didn’t know and was eager to explore. But that’s not really what this novel is about. Instead, this reads like a domestic drama as we follow three generations of the Cassar family — from France to Australia, Argentina, and Canada — and delve into their educations and relationships and careers; flitting among a largish cast of characters in a book that ultimately felt too long. I was often bored, recognised that many long stories were probably included because they were based on real events (although with little literary or entertainment value), and when something startling did happen, I recognised it as one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” situations that probably shouldn’t be included in a novel. This might have worked better as a straight memoir — with plenty of Algerian history included — and while I can’t deny that Messud writes lovely sentences, this was, overall, just okay for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.
François was eight when he travelled with his mother and younger sister to Algeria to wait out the war, his father writing to him that, “it was their place, the part of France where they belonged, that they were still building and perfecting.” And although François would eventually move to Paris for his education, when he received a Fullbright scholarship to Harvard, he was determined to perfect his American accent and reject his Frenchness; eventually marrying a Canadian woman and (after several other adventures) settling down in the States. François aspired to an academic career, and although he made it to grad school, having a wife and responsibilities forced him to compromise his dreams; becoming a corporate stooge, an alcoholic, and an unhappy bully to his wife and daughters.
Meanwhile, his parents — who had a perfect, storybook marriage — joined the expat community in Argentina with the daughter who felt responsible for taking care of them, and when they visited François’ family in America, it gave the only opportunity to revisit the question of the French in Algeria. François’ teenaged daughter Chloe (as “the writer of the family”, I assume she’s a stand-in for Claire Messud herself) “volunteered the accepted truism that the French presence in Algeria had been fundamentally wrong”, and while her Aunt Denise would bristle, “De Gaulle threw away our lives and our history because it was expedient, because of public opinion, the opinion polls of arrogant people in the metropole who couldn’t find Algeria on a map, who didn’t even know we spoke French, for God’s sake,” Denise and François’ father, Gaston, had a more provocative response: “When France embarked upon the Algerian undertaking, it was in the spirit, exactly, of the British in America or Australia…Might we not acknowledge that Australia and the United States are simply more successful examples of settler colonialism — no less unjust, no less brutal, simply with a fuller obliteration of the native cultures?” Naturally, like all of us in North America (and, one presumes, in the antipodes as well), Chloe doesn’t like this comparison, but that’s pretty much the end of the debate — and I would have liked much more of it.
Again: what we do get is a lot of writing on the domestic; from the lingering death of François’ father-in-law to Denise’s secret diaries (found by Chloe after her aunt’s death and shared with us here because, “surely she’d hidden the notebook there for someone to find, the stuff of novels: if she’d wanted it never to be found, then she would have thrown it away. What was writing for, if not to communicate? There was no such thing as writing that did not signify.”) There was a mundanity to it all that gave the sense of real life: and although in the prologue Messud writes that bit about constellations and connections and everything repeating upon itself, there were just too many “characters” swirling about in this, doing ordinary things despite an extraordinary backstory, for a wholly satisfying novel (and, again, I would not have minded all of the minutiae if this was a straightforward biography.)
To be sixty-five was to know that you dreamed the lazy lunch beneath the plane trees and window shopping along the Croisette, but that death was what was real; to be thirty-two, as Chloe was, meant you could still pretend the inverse was true. And still, why not, for the afternoon, dream?
As the novel ends, the fourth generation is running around while their forebears wink out one by one: this is a long way from WWII and Algeria and France — these kids are fully American and divorced from their pieds-noirs roots. For this reason, I can appreciate why Messud would want to memorialise her family’s history for future generations — and why she would want to include so many people who don’t really affect the “plot” — but I found it a bit of a slog to get through.
