This Strange Eventful History

I am reading This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, a story inspired by her family background. The Cassars, like the Messuds, are pieds-noirs, French settlers in Algeria, so theirs is a lost history, a story of exile and displacement, since the French colony is long gone by the time the narrator, a stand-in for Messud herself, comes to tell their story.

Though the story is based on Messud’s family, and some characters adhere to the twists and turns of her own fate—such as a family member choosing to go to America—it is a work of fiction. I would say, however, that the swirling of truth into the made-up details about Algiers or its surrounding countryside lends an immediacy to the characters’ observations or memories that not all stories have. Maybe it was just like this, you think, for a child in Algiers in 1941, or for a French diplomat in a country far from Paris when it fell.

I admire the quality of memory Messud conjures up. It feels effortless and poignant and very detailed. I only noticed how well it was working and the effort involved when the story bumped up against larger real world events—such as the Germans entering Paris—and the spell briefly wore off in the attempt to encompass a general, shared memory instead of relying on specific ones. This is not a criticism; on the contrary, it was these little breaches that helped highlight the level of craft. I longed for the specificity when I was away from it. Messud is very skilled at what she does. She is a great writer at the height of her powers.

The reason the family history is both strange and eventful is that the Cassars are not in charge of the events they are describing. For one thing, they are on the periphery of the action. Though the main narrative opens in 1940, just as France falls and the Germans are about to enter Paris, the Cassars are not in Paris. The patriarch of the family is a naval attaché in Greece who realizes he has to send his family back to Algeria before the Italians enter the war and the pathway to the ferry in Marseilles is closed off. They happen to be far from the main theater of war, but they also belong to the periphery as a matter of identity. Even when the patriarch’s son, François, does end up in Paris after the war, he carries the difference of being Algerian around with him. Even when he is in the center, he is not of it. He is perpetually cold and damp, missing the Mediterranean sun, and aware that he does not belong. When he is in America, and perceived simply as French, the ways in which he does not conform to type are what stand out for him. He is thrown together with another French boy—one from the mainland—and he can’t help but absorb the details of the other boy’s background, as if it’s more real than his own for being what is expected.

One major eddy or turning point in the narrative is the moment when the patriarch has a decision to make—whether he will follow De Gaulle. It may have been merely a feeling of mine, but there seemed to be an existentialist flavor to this episode. Camus is explicitly mentioned in the story, being one of the more famous pieds-noirs, and I read the rhetorical arrow pointing to this moment of decision as a nod to his philosophical presence in the background. Although I think one of the themes here—the strangeness of this history—is that these characters have less control over what happens to them than it might seem. Something can be eventful without you doing much of anything to bring the event about.

This novel has great depth and recreates its lost origins beautifully. It is an attempt to excavate what it is that we carry around with us as legacy, when there is no longer a physical legacy to be found. It feels important and is also a real pleasure.