{"id":33250,"date":"2024-05-31T08:53:30","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T06:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=33250"},"modified":"2024-05-31T08:53:30","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T06:53:30","slug":"this-strange-eventful-history-by-claire-messud-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/this-strange-eventful-history-by-claire-messud-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"This Strange Eventful History<\/em> by Claire Messud \u2014A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
In a novel filled with characters haunted by questions of identity, Messud lets us see that who they are does not lie, at the end of the day, in nationality, but rather in a family history that is, as the title puts it, both \u201cstrange\u201d and \u201ceventful.\u201d<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

This<\/span><\/i> Strange Eventful History\u00a0<\/span><\/i>by Claire Messud
\nW.W. Norton<\/a>, 2024
\nISBN 978039363504
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katherine A. Powers<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

This<\/span><\/i> Strange Eventful History<\/span><\/i> is Claire Messud\u2019s sixth full-length novel and is, she says, based on the history of her own family, much of it recorded by her paternal grandfather in a 1,500-page manuscript bequeathed to his grandchildren. Aspects of this history have shown up in Messud\u2019s previous works but never so comprehensively. Here we have a deep, fictional exploration of the aftershocks of Messud\u2019s paternal grandparents\u2019 exile from Algeria, the country they considered to be part of the French nation, just as they themselves were French. Reality, if not realization, hit with the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence (1954 \u2013 1962). As a result, the Messuds moved to France where, as reviled <\/span>pieds-noirs<\/span><\/i>, they found no warm welcome. Exiled from the sunny land of their birth, they passed on a sense of loss and dislocation to their descendants.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This Strange Eventful History is published by W.W. Norton.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The family of the novel is the Cassars, French settlers in Algeria for over a hundred years. But now it is 1940 and the first blow lands: France has fallen to Nazi Germany. Gaston Cassar, the head of the family, is stationed in Salonica, Greece, as a naval attach\u00e9 at the French consulate. Frustrated by his irrelevance in the conflict, he longs to be on active duty fighting for France in her navy \u2014 whose future, given Germany\u2019s military triumph, is uncertain. Beyond that, he misses his two children, Fran\u00e7ois and Denise, but, above all, he misses his wife, Lucienne, to whom he is bound by a love that approaches neediness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gaston\u2019s great disappointment, aside from exile, is that he has had to forsake his desire to be a writer and is obliged to pursue a business career to support his family. During and after the Second World War, Gaston, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, moves constantly, from Greece to Lebanon to Turkey, back to Algeria and away again, eventually settling in Toulon, France. Despite the disruption, he and Lucienne hold on to what they see as their essential identity. \u201cWhat am I? [\u2026] What am I for?\u201d he asks himself early in the story. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois and Denise consider their parents\u2019 marriage idyllic, \u201cfated, mythic, enormous,\u201d a perfect amalgam of love, compatibility, and mutual dependence against which they will judge their own lives \u2014 not very favorably. For Fran\u00e7ois, the novel\u2019s most complex and thoroughly examined character, nationality and family have become a queasy mix of ambivalence and dissatisfaction. He rejects France, in part as a result of attending a brutal boarding school in Paris, a city so alien, damp, dreary and dark that he suffers a nervous breakdown. But further, he doesn\u2019t feel that \u201cFrenchness\u201d is integral to him; rather that it has been \u201cabsorbed [\u2026] osmotically from literature and films and schoolbooks.\u201d By 1953, he is attending Amherst College in Massachusetts on a scholarship, has joined a fraternity, erased his French accent, and embraced America. But a vague sense of loss and disruption bedevils him, powerfully represented by Messud in the image of the letters Fran\u00e7ois receives from his family: \u201cthe little stack of blue airmail envelopes on the corner of his desk, their Algerian stamps, exotic to the frat brothers, mostly torn out, leaving, like wounds, the white letters themselves partially exposed.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois marries Barbara, a Canadian, for whom the United States is \u201canathema.\u201d As such, it\u2019s an uneasy match and a source of further uncertainty and alienation. Beyond that, Fran\u00e7ois, like his father, has to surrender the life of the mind for a career in business to support his wife and two daughters. This entails constant travel, including a sojourn in Australia. Unlike his father, Fran\u00e7ois does not suffer adversity and dislocation stoically \u2014 he feels unmoored, lonely, unloved, his frustration erupting in bouts of anger. His sister Denise, a brittle, nervous creature, idolizes her parents and follows them to France; although she has a job, and despite a period of secret and deluded infatuation with a married man, they are her life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Cassars as a whole are preoccupied by family history and questions of national identity, the latter made more confounding by France\u2019s rejection of the <\/span>pieds-noirs<\/span><\/i>. Gaston\u2019s and Lucienne\u2019s marriage is the one sure thing to which following generations feel they belong, though as exiles from Algeria, the couple, too, represents dislocation. It is only the third generation of the Cassars, Fran\u00e7ois\u2019s and Barbara\u2019s two daughters, Chloe and Loulou, who can see Algeria for what it was: a country occupied and exploited by settler colonists \u2014 and this reality makes their national inheritance all the more problematic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Plot has never really been Messud\u2019s concern; her interest lies in the development and nature of relationships among people, especially within families, and, often, with their relation to nationality. In a novel filled with characters haunted by questions of identity, she lets us see that who they are does not lie, at the end of the day, in nationality, but rather in a family history that is, as the title puts it, both \u201cstrange\u201d and \u201ceventful.\u201d This, as it happens, seems to be what Gaston finally comes to believe as he, like Messud\u2019s grandfather, devotes himself to writing his own 1,500-page family history. The primacy of family is brought home all the more potently when Messud dishes up a stunning fact toward the novel\u2019s end \u2014 one earlier and obscurely hinted at \u2014 which when disclosed is akin to a plot twist. It\u2019s a startling revelation that gives rise to a somewhat different interpretation of the story just told. Messud\u2019s delay in producing this information is a touch of genius, and this intensely felt, sharply observed novel is her greatest achievement so far.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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