★ 03/25/2024
Messud (The Burning Girl ) draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country’s 1954–62 war of independence. Patriarch Gaston Cassar and his wife, Lucienne, whose seemingly perfect marriage contains within it a scandalous secret (the particulars of which dovetail artfully in Messud’s telling with the lingering stain of colonialism on France and the pieds-noirs), make peace with their displacement by clinging to their Catholic faith. Their daughter, Denise, follows her parents from Buenos Aires to Toulon, France, nursing a series of unrequited loves and a fierce sense of injustice. Her older brother, François, earns a spot at one of France’s most prestigious lycées but can’t bear the damp cold of Paris, or the shame of being from a colonial outpost the rest of the nation is ready to abandon. He makes his way to America on a Fulbright fellowship and then to Oxford University, where he meets Barbara, a Canadian student drawn to his Gallic “insouciance.” Their marriage strains, but never breaks, under the weight of their cultural differences and Barbara’s frustrated ambitions. In the novel’s final sections, their youngest daughter, Chloe, reckons with the older generations’ physical and mental decline, and with her own sense of rootlessness. In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is a wonder. (May)
"This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment—rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family—and we suspect as we read it, her own—is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite."
"It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose."
"Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century, and inspired by Messud’s own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound."
"What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time—implacable and indecipherable—befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know."
"Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History …all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies…all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak."
"This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl , Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud’s grandfather."
"A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family."
"A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century; call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras; call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory."
"There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud’s latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval…Sold."
"A novelist of exquisite artistry and insight draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga…Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page."
Booklist (starred review) - Donna Seaman
"This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl , Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud’s grandfather."
Most Anticipated Fiction of 2024 Book Page
"There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud’s latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval…Sold."
Most Anticipated Books of 2024 Lit Hub
"Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century, and inspired by Messud’s own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound."
The Most Anticipated Books of 2024 Oprah Daily
05/01/2024
Messud's (Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write ) newest is a semi-autobiographical novel of her own family history, an epic generational story that sprawls across the world and from the 1940s to 2010. The fictional Cassars were what the French call "pieds-noirs," ethnically French but born and living in Algeria, until the upheaval of World War II and Algeria's independence from France left them without a homeland. Each chapter is part of the larger picture of the Cassar family history, told from one character's perspective. The anxiety and emotional turmoil the whole family feels about no longer having a home is a thread woven throughout the novel, forcing each character to grapple with where they think they belong in the world. Much of the narrative revolves around the daily lives of different generations of Cassars. Some events, such as deaths and marriages, are momentous, but much of the plot is incremental and domestic in nature, and the inner lives of characters are more important than physical action. VERDICT A meticulous tale about one family, rich in historical detail. Recommended for historical fiction readers who enjoy epic family histories and cerebral characters.—Kristen Stewart
★ 2024-02-03
Readers of Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020) will recognize the autobiographical elements in Messud’s novel, but they are less important than the compelling way she has reinvented her family as fully fleshed fictional characters. Gaston and Lucienne Cassare, a French Algerian couple uprooted first by World War II and then by Algerian independence, embody for their son, François, and daughter, Denise, a loving companionship so total that both children will spend their lives looking for its equal. Denise, whose personal attachments rarely work out, clings to her parents’ devout Catholicism; François might have made a home in America—“its energy, its freedom, its carelessness” thrill him as an Amherst undergraduate—but his Canadian wife, Barbara, objects. Their peripatetic marriage survives her extended absences to care for her dying father in Toronto and the damage inflicted on his business career when she insists they leave Australia, but he can never get over the fact that Barbara always holds part of herself apart from him. Messud portrays the Cassares at key moments in their lives, beginning in Algeria as France falls in June 1940 and ranging across continents and seven decades: Geneva, Toronto, Toulon, Buenos Aires, suburban Connecticut, and New York—wherever their varied fortunes take them, with the author’s fictional stand-in, aspiring writer Chloe, and her sister, Loulou, entering as schoolgirls in 1970s Sydney. Messud paints compelling portraits of internal conflicts and tangled relationships, dropping along the way tantalizing references to crucial events that will be clarified later, in a rich narrative that defies summary. The novel reaches a poignant climax as the older generations age and die: Gaston and François succumb to physical ailments; Lucienne and Barbara descend into dementia. The marriage of François and Barbara, bitterly antagonistic but ultimately loyal, is perhaps the novel’s most wrenching depiction, but Messud’s gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping.
Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature’s best.
