This Strange Eventful History

December 1, 2023

Inspired by her family history and 10 years in the making, Messud's new historical saga spans seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, about a pieds-noirs family who are left without a home after Algeria gains its independence from France. She explores the inner lives of these characters against the backdrop of social and political upheaval. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2024
A family rides the waves of current events and personal conflicts across three generations. Readers of Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020) will recognize the autobiographical elements in Messud's novel, but they are less important than the compelling way she has reinvented her family as fully fleshed fictional characters. Gaston and Lucienne Cassare, a French Algerian couple uprooted first by World War II and then by Algerian independence, embody for their son, Fran�ois, and daughter, Denise, a loving companionship so total that both children will spend their lives looking for its equal. Denise, whose personal attachments rarely work out, clings to her parents' devout Catholicism; Fran�ois might have made a home in America--"its energy, its freedom, its carelessness" thrill him as an Amherst undergraduate--but his Canadian wife, Barbara, objects. Their peripatetic marriage survives her extended absences to care for her dying father in Toronto and the damage inflicted on his business career when she insists they leave Australia, but he can never get over the fact that Barbara always holds part of herself apart from him. Messud portrays the Cassares at key moments in their lives, beginning in Algeria as France falls in June 1940 and ranging across continents and seven decades: Geneva, Toronto, Toulon, Buenos Aires, suburban Connecticut, and New York--wherever their varied fortunes take them, with the author's fictional stand-in, aspiring writer Chloe, and her sister, Loulou, entering as schoolgirls in 1970s Sydney. 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. The novel reaches a poignant climax as the older generations age and die: Gaston and Fran�ois succumb to physical ailments; Lucienne and Barbara descend into dementia. The marriage of Fran�ois and Barbara, bitterly antagonistic but ultimately loyal, is perhaps the novel's most wrenching depiction, but Messud's 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.

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Starred review from March 25, 2024
Messud (The Burning Girl) 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. Patriarch Gaston Cassar and his wife, Lucienne, whose seemingly perfect marriage contains within it a scandalous secret (the particulars of which dovetail artfully in Messud’s telling with the lingering stain of colonialism on France and the pieds-noirs), make peace with their displacement by clinging to their Catholic faith. Their daughter, Denise, follows her parents from Buenos Aires to Toulon, France, nursing a series of unrequited loves and a fierce sense of injustice. Her older brother, François, earns a spot at one of France’s most prestigious lycées but can’t bear the damp cold of Paris, or the shame of being from a colonial outpost the rest of the nation is ready to abandon. He makes his way to America on a Fulbright fellowship and then to Oxford University, where he meets Barbara, a Canadian student drawn to his Gallic “insouciance.” Their marriage strains, but never breaks, under the weight of their cultural differences and Barbara’s frustrated ambitions. In the novel’s final sections, their youngest daughter, Chloe, reckons with the older generations’ physical and mental decline, and with her own sense of rootlessness. 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 a wonder.

April 1, 2024
Gaston Cassar, an Algerian-born French naval attach� stationed in Greece, can barely stand being separated from his wife, Lucienne, and their young children, Fran�ois and Denise, but it's 1940 and WWII is erupting, so he sends his family home. Messud (The Burning Girl, 2017), a novelist of exquisite artistry and insight, draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga. The displacements and sacrifices of war and marriage, the obdurate insistencies of the self, the conflict between pragmatism and desire are intently explored within the roil of geopolitics as Messud gives voice to her characters' thoughts, fears, yearnings, and anger. As age ravages Lucienne and Gaston, as Fran�ois and Barbara navigate a difficult marriage made worse by his sharp-clawed demons and raise two smart daughters who become mothers, as Denise copes with delusion and despair, Messud renders each inner and outer life in finely detailed, scintillating prose. Each landscape, season, and household in Algeria, France, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the U.S. are opulently described and infused with emotion. Messud choreographs persistent sorrow, surprising choices, political paradoxes, helpless entanglements, and thwarted dreams, evincing keen knowledge of diverse realms and predicaments. Young Chloe thinks, "everything is precarious;" certainly everything is in flux, and Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page.

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May 1, 2024

Messud's (Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write) newest is a semi-autobiographical novel of her own family history, an epic generational story that sprawls across the world and from the 1940s to 2010. The fictional Cassars were what the French call "pieds-noirs," ethnically French but born and living in Algeria, until the upheaval of World War II and Algeria's independence from France left them without a homeland. Each chapter is part of the larger picture of the Cassar family history, told from one character's perspective. The anxiety and emotional turmoil the whole family feels about no longer having a home is a thread woven throughout the novel, forcing each character to grapple with where they think they belong in the world. Much of the narrative revolves around the daily lives of different generations of Cassars. Some events, such as deaths and marriages, are momentous, but much of the plot is incremental and domestic in nature, and the inner lives of characters are more important than physical action. VERDICT A meticulous tale about one family, rich in historical detail. Recommended for historical fiction readers who enjoy epic family histories and cerebral characters.--Kristen Stewart

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