This Strange Eventful History: A Novel by Claire Messud (HC)

An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-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 merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

REVIEWS

"Claire Messud turns her family's history into a masterpiece…This Strange Eventful History is a novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe."― Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one…After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction…Each section is absorbing…As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed―no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling…How attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been."― Joan Silber, New York Times Book Review

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Fleet
ISBN: 978-0349127057
Pages: 448