Books: “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud
Family can serve as a bulwark against an unfamiliar, often unaccepting world. This is especially true if you’re a member of the Cassar family, the protagonists of Claire Messud’s new novel “This Strange Eventful History.”
The Cassars are “pieds noirs,” a derogatory term for French people born on Algerian soil. After the Algerian war for independence in the late 1950s through 1962, almost a million of these citizens fled to France, where they were regarded as curiosities and second-class citizens.
It wasn’t always that way for paterfamilias Gaston Cassar, a diplomat and distinguished officer in the French Navy. He faces a quandary in 1940 when given the choice of siding with deGaulle or Vichy France. Post-war, he migrates into the business world where he succeeds but is less than enthusiastic.
Gaston’s son Francois, determined to escape his Roman Catholic upbringing in Algeria, becomes a Fulbright scholar, and proceeds to study at Amherst, Ecole Normale in Paris and finally Harvard. While in America, he drives to Key West to find his "existential self” but eventually is resigned like his father to enter the business world. He swiftly moves up the corporate ladder and his company relocates him, along with Barbara, his reluctant Protestant Canadian wife and their two daughters, to the firm’s offices in Buenos Aires, Sydney, Toronto, and Greenwich, Connecticut. In effect, they remain members of the French-Algerian diaspora, without a country they can call their own.
Denise, Gaston’s daughter, dutifully follows her parents around the world but never really becomes her own person. Directionless and lonely, she falls passionately in love with her married boss whom as a pious roman Catholic she doesn’t dare pursue.
The time span of the novel is 70 years and the narrative moves seamlessly from 1940 to the mid-1950s to the 70s to present day. At each juncture, events of the outer world intrude (i.e., glastnost, the Internet.) The world changes but the ties between the Cassars remain strong.
Messud drew inspiration for her novel from a handwritten memoir of over 1,000 pages authored by her French-Algerian paternal grandfather. Her ability to capture the emotions and inner thoughts of each family member and switch between the characters’ various POVs is remarkable. As a result, no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. And what a fascinating group and piece of writing it is.
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