Reviews
Claire Messud is an author who perfectly pairs scale and intimacy in her prose. Inspired in part Messud's family history, This Strange Eventful History is an epic cross-generational story that follows a pieds-noirs family separated in the chaos of World War II and made adrift without a homeland after Algerian independence. The novel's ingenuity and ambitious scope can't be underestimated; This Strange Eventful History is nothing less than a literary event, sure to surprise and delight at every turn., Messud's strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them., A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century; call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras; call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory., 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., The always incredible Claire Messud's own history helped inspire this engrossing story, which follows a complicated family--as if there were any other kind--across decades and around the world, as legends are made, secrets are buried, and truths come out in the most unexpected of ways. It's a touching, skillfully crafted work that reminds us of the ongoing stories of which we're all a part., "[Messud] is a skilled prose stylist. One of her signature moves is a reliance on long, flowing, perfectly composed sentences filled with parallel constructions, perhaps an analogue to the flow of history...Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life's challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional rifts...As she navigates her own complex, beclouded legacy, Messud's generosity of spirit prevails. "Sometimes we feel alone,'" her alter ego, 7-year-old Chloe, tells herself, wise beyond her years, "but we are always more closely connected than we think."", [Claire Messud] paints compelling portraits of internal conflicts and tangled relationships, dropping along the way tantalizing references to crucial events that will be clarified later, in a rich narrative that defies summary...[her] gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping. Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature's best., "[Messud's] novels frequently feature characters who are adrift and unmoored, with complex lineages that scan as vaguely foreign wherever they are. We watch others try to discipline those unruly identities, awkwardly forcing their historical baggage into cramped boxes. In This Strange Eventful History, Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled "Everything That We Believed In," that her paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it", Claire Messud's profound and exacting new novel is an epic involving several generations of a diasporic family on a volatile earth--a fictionalised version, as the prologue tells us, of her own family's wanderings, an attempt at the imaginative retrieval of beloved persons and memories lost in the ruins of time., 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., "The big questions are here, about family and colonialism and grief. But the real promise of a 425-page family epic is that it will provide an emotional punch, too. On that, it delivers...The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud's steady belief in it is intoxicating. "Literary language is a kind of spell," she writes in the introduction of her 2020 essay collection. Similar to one character's "beautiful French, like his cravat, somewhat old-fashioned, but so elegant," her style comes to seem like a purposeful constraint. This Strange Eventful History might use some old tricks, but it's hard not to be hypnotized", Ambitious in sweep and scope, [This Strange Eventful History] spans seven decades from 1940 to 2010, and chronicles in a stunning, meticulous prose three generations of the Cassar family as they whirl about the globe...Messud insightfully explores the complex themes of conflicting claims of identity, the trauma of rootlessness, the power of family secrets to corrupt and corrode across generations, the brutal legacy of colonialism, how memory and denial shape us, how family history and world events coincide and collide...Messud, often praised for her ability to capture the tiniest, most telling details of her characters' lives and environments, here comprehensively portrays her own characters' seven decades...Throughout her novel, Claire Messud allows us to share in François's expansive intellectual inquisitiveness, proving in her lyrical, thought-provoking prose that she is very much her fictional father's daughter., What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time--implacable and indecipherable--befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know., Based on Messud's own family journey, this sprawling saga reaches from 1940s French Algeria to modern-day Connecticut, illuminating the toll of war, displacement and one shocking secret on successive generations of a clan buffeted by history. Evocative and eye-opening., [Messud] draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country's 1954-62 war of independence...In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is an astonishment., Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century, and inspired by Messud's own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound., A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family., A novelist of exquisite artistry and insight draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga...Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page., A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century, call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras, call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory., Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History...all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies...all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak., This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment--rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family--and we suspect as we read it, her own--is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite., A meticulous tale about one family, rich in historical detail. Recommended for historical fiction readers who enjoy epic family histories and cerebral characters., There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud's latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval...Sold., This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor's Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl, Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud's grandfather., "Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike," but "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Sometimes, though, unhappiness has to do with what is universal, and this is what Messud is especially adept at conveying...In writing this breathtaking ode--and lament--of a novel, Messud honors her ancestors by interrogating the circumstances that shaped them and the questions that plagued them. ", [This Strange Eventful History] is slow and cumulative, skillfully building to a low but steady boil while delivering quiet, elliptical moments that nevertheless linger in the mind...[Messud's novel] is a kind of epic of inaction, and while it finely illustrates the predicament of the diasporic pieds-noirs, the novel also possesses a broader generational relevance., What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours--of the world as it spins toward and away from World War Two into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludes us, how time---implacable and indecipherable--befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know.
