I had high hopes for Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History when I first heard of it, and had actually started reading it before the 2024 Booker Prize longlist was released a few weeks ago. Partially set in Algeria during the 1940s-1950s and centering around a pied-noir (French citizens whose families originally came to Algeria to colonize the country on behalf of France) family, it meshed perfectly with my personal experience and interest. Unfortunately, my high hopes came crashing down as soon as I realized that Messud was largely going to skip right over the periods and places I was most interested in reading about.
Instead, Messud offers the seven-decade (1940-2010) story of the Cassar family as it expands and moves around the world in the aftermath of one significant family decision or event after another. The patriarch of the family is Gaston Cassar, who when the book begins has just evacuated his family from WWII-era Greece to the homes of relatives in Algeria. Gaston is a French naval attache and knows that he is unlikely to see his wife (Lucienne), son (Gaston), and daughter (Denise) again anytime soon. This section is seen primarily through the eyes of François, Gaston’s young son and it gives the first hint of Messud’s approach to this family saga: it will focus on the personal lives and struggles of the small family rather than on the major historical events occurring all around them. The first jump forward in time is significant. It is suddenly 1953, the war is over, and François is now in the U.S. attending college. The remainder of the family remains in Algeria, struggling to make ends meet while keeping their financial problems a secret from François.
The next jump forward in time, entirely ignoring the revolution that won Algeria’s independence from France between segments, is to 1962 Canada (where François is in business school) and 1963 Argentina where his sister Denise is living with their parents. The segment is largely about the now 30-year-old Denise and her struggles to find her place in life. You get the idea. Each segment of the novel jumps forward about ten years in time, and each usually sees at least part of the family living in a new country. So we get 1974 Australia, 1989 Connecticut, 1998 France, and finally 2010 Rye Brook, New York. The book then circles back to 1927 Algeria for a short look back at Gaston and Lucienne’s courting days.
All of this makes for a rather traditional family saga, the kind that covers multiple generations of a single family in order to show how they ended up who they are – and where they are – in the present day. As such, this is not at all a bad novel. But I have to look at This Strange Eventful History as a missed opportunity to write something special, a novel in which the “events” really were “strange” rather than relatively mundane and common in the long run.
