In Search of Home

In the vast ambit of literature, various genres exist and coexist. A genre often overlooked but nevertheless fundamental in literature is the family saga. Throughout history, writers have been plotting stories of families that explored the intricacies and dysfunctionalities of families. These sagas are often vessels through which other germane literary themes are explored. Several of these books have earned the status of being literary classics. Some of these prominent works chart the rise and fall of notable families. This is exemplified by works such as Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (18th century) or The Story of the Stone, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature that charted the fortunes of the Jia family; and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) which captured the rise and decline of the titular Buddenbrooks and the book that earned the German writer the Swedish Academy’s nod for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature.

Family sagas have developed into thematic devices for portraying particular historical events and examining their impact. Egyptian Nobel Laureate in Literature’s The Cairo Trilogy (1956-1957), his most renowned work, charts the story of Al-Sayyid (Mr.) Ahmad ‘Abd al-Jawad and his family. Their story was juxtaposed with the historical events that altered the landscape of contemporary Egyptian history from 1919 to shortly before the conclusion of the Second World War. In Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise (2021) the story of the Swart family is backdropped with the changes sweeping South Africa in the latter parts of the 20th century. Family sagas also navigate thorny issues that hound relationships between a group of people and even nations. Korean-American writer Min Jin Lee’s sophomore novel, Pachinko, confronts issues related to the Korean experience of Japan through the story of a Korean family who immigrated to Japan in the early 20th century.

American Algerian writer Claire Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, was molded in the same vein. Messud’s ninth novel transports the readers to French Algeria. The novel, however, commences in Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki), Greece. The year was 1940 and the Nazis stormed into France and eventually into the French capital, forcing the country to bow before the invading Germans. In Salonica, thirty-four-year-old Gaston Cassar hears the broadcast of General Charles de Gaulle. The General was calling the French soldiers who “want to remain free” to join the Resistance and carry on the fight. Gaston was a naval attaché to the French embassy in Salonica sent a year before to spy on Mussolini’s men in the Aegean Sea. With General de Gaulle’s call, Gaston was caught on an impasse, torn between his duty to serve the country or to be safely reunited with his wife; he was provided the option to take a post in Beirut.

She knew loss too well, knew that your dear ones never left, that they stayed with you, spoke to you, attempted to console you, but that these ghosts had no arms to hold you, that no one else could hear their jokes. That their love was not enough. And that as more and more of these familiars passed away, the world around you became less and less interesting, less and less real.

  Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

To ensure his family’s safety amidst the brewing war, Gaston made the wise decision of sending his wife, Lucienne, and children – François and Denise – to their native French colonial Algeria. Technically, the former French colony was not their homeland. The Cassars are pieds-noirs, a family of European descent who were born in the former French colony. The Cassars considered Algeria their home, while, at the same time, claiming French citizenship. Gaston was confident that his family would find safety and comfort in the company of their relatives in the commune of L’Arba, Algeria. When Lucienne and her children, François and Denise, arrived in Algeria, they found themselves unwanted by relatives. They were also treated with lukewarm response by anyone in the dusty village where they settled. This was a shocking response from a country they have also considered to be their own home.

The story then leaps forward in time as the story endeavors to paint an evocative portrait of the Cassars and their descendants. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, the story resumes in January 1953. François arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts where he was accepted at Amherst College on a Fulbright scholarship. At this juncture, the complexities of his provenance started to manifest. His fraternity brothers acknowledged his whiteness. However, they regarded it as impure. To French exchange students, François was “foreign” because “he knew, a (mostly) white colonial African from that mysterious terrain across the Mediterranean.” To Americans, he was simply an anomaly who they could not categorize. He was their token “Ay-rab.” All of these underline how the Cassars were losing their ethnic identity. They were homeless, They were uprooted. They were rootless.

When colonial Algeria started to fight for its independence in the early 1960s, the homelessness and waning ethnic identity of the Cassars got more complicated. When Algeria declared its independence in 1962, nearly a million pieds-noirs, alongside thousands of Harkis, Muslim Algerians who had fought for the French colonial government, fled the former French colony and began an exodus toward France; several pieds-noirs already fled Algeria when the tension started to escalate. However, even France could not offer a reprieve. The pieds-noirs were regarded as impure and were frowned upon. Their impurities were derivatives of what the French viewed as the empire’s dirty works. The Cassars and their fellow pied-noirs were essentially displaced, with no place to call home. Uprooted, the Cassar children set off traversing the globe. They lived nomadic existences that took them from Paris to Sydney, Havana to Toulon, Buenos Aires to Connecticut

The quintessence of a family saga, This Strange Eventful History then charts the fortunes of the descendants of Gaston and Lucienne. Their triumphs and tribulations accrued as the story moved forward while experiencing joy and victories. As their individual threads take them across the world, they would experience traumas and losses. François marries the Toronto-born Barbara. Gaston’s complicated ethnic origin piqued Barbara’s interest in him. She was drawn into the intrigue of his ethnic background which she regarded as exotic and, hence, attractive. Ironically, it was François’s murky racial identity that was the primary reason why Barbara’s family disapproved of him. This foreshadows the pall that hovered over their marriage. Nevertheless, their union would bear two daughters, Chloe and Loulou. In her sections of the polyvocal novel, Chloe addresses us directly from her point of view.

I try hard not to get in trouble ever – I think of it as one of my jobs, really, because my job at home is to make people laugh and to get along, which they won’t do if they are cross with me. I’m afraid of so many things but try hard not to show it, because then I would be a bother, I would be trouble, exactly, in a different way from being naughty, but with the same result. I am trying to always be invisible but better than invisible if that makes sense. You see, my mummy is very busy because she goes to Law School, and my daddy is often away on important business, sometimes for weeks at at a time.

  Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

Meanwhile, Denise is the family misfit. Like her brother, she lived a peripatetic existence and would experience the same casual racism that her brother experienced. When she resumed her studies in Paris following the declaration of independence by Algeria and the diaspora of the pied-noirs and harkis, she felt the stigma surrounding her Algerian origins hovering around her. This growing sense of alienation was exacerbated by a romantic involvement that prematurely ended, prompting her to move around. However, struggled to adapt to her new environment, first in Buenos Aires and then back in France. She was also hounded by questions of her being French and not being French simultaneously. This is a recurring theme in the novel and a reality that the characters confront wherever they end up. Rather than navigating this quandary, the Cassars try to find a way out of it.

Displacement, the sense of belonging, and the yearning for home are the backbones of the novel. Through the experiences of her characters, Messud vividly captures the plights of individuals born with mixed heritage. The pieds-noirs straddle the thin lines of being Europeans and being Africans. The Cassars often find their ethnic identity an object of fascination for some and disdain for others. In France, they were frowned upon and worse, stigmatized for being French born in the colonies. In Algeria, their colonial origins earned them the ire of the locals. They are left perplexed by the complexity of their ethnic identity because they cannot seem to belong to either group. As such, the novel also transforms into an evocative probe into identity. In François’ words: This was where his family belonged, Here’ was France — Algeria of course, but Algeria was France — and this was home, apparently.

In This Strange Eventful History, the struggle to understand one’s identity is not limited to ethnicity. Denise’s struggle for emotional fulfillment was exacerbated by the questions surrounding her sexual identity. It was hinted that she was a closeted lesbian. However, she denies it and refuses to embrace her true self. Her personal crises, however, do not take precedence over the others. The novel’s dispersed structure keeps the readers’ sympathies distributed. This underscores the strangeness of the novel markets itself. Elsewhere, the novel also probes into colonialism through the colonizer’s point of view. Each character has an interesting and compelling view of France’s colonization of Algeria and most of Northern Africa; Algeria was a French colony from 1839 to 1962. It was compelling how the characters rationalized the colonialization of Algeria. Messud posits that the perspective is different across generations.

As the landscape of the world changes – the novel spans seven decades – it is palpable how the characters are changing. Some of these changes were drastic. When François was younger, he was a responsible older brother who looked after his younger and vulnerable sister. When he started studying in America, he became a self-absorbed college student who was also driven by the pursuit of the American Dream. This also set him on the path of existentialism. Another notable change took place upon marrying Barbara who, on the other hand, was soon disillusioned. What once fascinated her about her husband became a wedge in their relationship. This also turned into a self-deprecating humor that ridiculed her failure at becoming a Frenchwoman. Nevertheless, moments of catharsis slowly bridge the gaps between the characters, both primary and secondary. As events around them constantly swirl, the characters continue to develop. Their characteristics, beliefs, and demeanors are challenged and changed. A domineering and bigoted mother, for instance, turns into a loving grandmother through the lens of her grandchildren.

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.

  Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

This Strange Eventful History, like Mann’s epic Buddenbrooks, takes inspiration from the history of Messud’s family. Like the main characters in her latest novel, Messud was the daughter of pieds-noirs and in the postscript, she tells us that “the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own family.” In fact, it can be surmised that Chloe was Messud’s alter ego. Like her grandfather, Chloe yearned to be a writer. When she grew up, Chloe confronted the maladies that hounded her family, including her parent’s loveless marriage, her disturbed aunt, and the life lived by her grandparents. Helping her wade through her family’s vast landscape were two texts: her grandfather’s 1,500-page history of his family and her aunt’s diary. Messud also mapped the Cassar family’s history referencing her paternal grandfather’s chronicle of their family history titled Everything That We Believed In.

In her ninth novel. Messud demonstrated that she is a consummate storyteller. She also has a penchant for crafting psychologically complex and interesting characters who hold the readers’ interest. This Strange Eventful History is certainly strange and eventful. It is vast and sweeping in scope, moving across time and chronicling the contours of history. It is an ambitious undertaking which Messud admitted to have worked on for a lifetime. On the other hand, it is this complexity that can be the novel’s undoing. A straightforward story it is not. The chaos that hovered above the story mirrors the messiness that resonates with reality. This, however, was further complicated by the wealth of superfluous details woven into what was already a lush tapestry. These details neither pushed the story forward nor added value to it.

Nevertheless, Messud accomplished a lot. The novel’s finer elements made up for the blunders and weaknesses. This Strange and Eventful History is a sweeping story of a family, chronicling their triumphs and tribulations. Their disappointments, frustrations, and struggles were vividly captured by Messud. In the process, she casts a net over a vast territory of subjects, including rootlessness, the yearning for a semblance of home, the complexities of identity, the intricacies of family dynamics, and the dysfunctionalities of families. Messud crafted an eclectic cast of characters who were all yearning for belongingness, if not to a person, then to a place. All the while, the novel probes into the heritage of colonialism, particularly through the experiences of pieds-noirs. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, This Strange Eventful History is a thought-provoking and complex tale that confronts what we know about our own family. It takes us on a rollercoaster ride, at times chaotic but always eventful.

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.

  Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History
Book Specs

Author: Claire Messud
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 423
Genre: Historical, Family Saga, Literary

Synopsis

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pied-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state – separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is a “tour de force. . . one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

About the Author

Claire Messud was born on October 8, 1966, in Greenwich, Connecticut to a Canadian mother and a pied-noir father from French Algeria. Growing up, she lived a nomadic life which took her to Australia and Canada before returning to the United States as a teenager. She was educated at the University of Toronto Schools and Milton Academy. She did undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale University and Cambridge University.

Growing up, Messud’s literary taste and curiosity were cultivated by her mother who introduced her to the works of Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bowen, and Jean Rhys. In 1995, she made her literary debut with the publication of When The World Was Steady which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her sophomore novel, The Last Life, was published in 1999. Her third novel, The Emperor’s Children (2006) further elevated Messud to global recognition. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her ninth and most recent novel, This Strange Eventful History (2024) was also longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also longlisted for the Giller Prize. Her articles have also appeared in publications such as The New York Review of Books.

Among Messud’s other accolades include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ recognition of her talent with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award. She was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, although none of the three passports she holds is British. From 2010 to 2011, she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin / Institute of Advanced Study. Apart from writing, Messud is a prolific lecturer. Messud has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Kenyon College, University of Maryland, Yale University, in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina, and in the Graduate Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Messud also taught at Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is currently a senior lecturer in the English Department at Harvard University, where she is part of the Creative Writing faculty.

Messud currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is married to fellow novelist James Wood whom she met at Cambridge University.