Claire Messud: This Strange Eventful History review - home is where the heart was

Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is simultaneously expansive and intimate.

This fact is acknowledged in the book’s afterword; but it can also be found in various grammatical and narrative slippages: the shift from third- to first-person when we meet granddaughter Chloe, for instance, who feels like a cypher for Messud; or else, a bittersweet scene in which Chloe finds her grandfather’s reams of (mostly unpublished) articles, his vast family history, or her aunt’s diary – all of which ring with hubris and frustrated hopes. Through such moments, the published novel – right there, in your hand – stands as both redemptive and guilt-ridden.

It is also an interesting documentation of a French-Algerian (pieds-noirs) family, wandering and adrift in the upheavals of the 20th century. The novel opens with a mother and her children fleeing war to France in 1940, after which we trace their family’s various movements around the world – and the corresponding chaos and itinerancy of their inner lives. Set against this is the deep emotional complexity of their origins as French settlers in Algeria, caught in between two countries when the latter won its independence in the early 1960s. Messud describes the family with total, often brutal honesty, but at times the novel can feel oddly disconnected and slightly stilted.

We begin with the aforementioned Chloe, daughter of Francois, himself son of Gaston, looking back at her family’s (the Cassars’) lives. Francois, his mother, and his sister, Denise, were sent to live with distant relatives, whilst their father laboured on behalf of France in Salonica, Greece. All are deeply unhappy, far from each other and from their homeland of Algeria – especially Gaston and his wife, who are deeply devoted to one another. All are cast around the globe throughout the course of the book: to France, Greece, Algeria, England, the USA, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Buenos Aires. They seem doomed to wander the earth and never find a home (except, perhaps, in each other, though this, too, remains an uneasy habitation). This sense of unhappy predestiny is increased by Messud’s rather unsettling habit of fast-forwarding the lives of her characters, suddenly – and jarringly – hurtling into their future and towards their eventual death. Such a narrative move adds profoundly to the sense of disconnection with which the novel operates. This does seem to be what Messud wants the reader to feel, but unlike other great family epics (The Eighth Life, Pachinko, to name a couple), it doesn’t always work, in the main because it feels so clearly like a trope.

In following the lives of the Cassars and their satellites, Messud allows each of them to exist as a whole, complicated person, each unpleasant in their own way (often to one another). She is sympathetic to their bad habits – smoking, alcoholism, anger, Catholicism – but describes well how these bad habits can affect those around them. Within in this, too, is a critique of the power of denial and self-loathing: Denise and her brother Francois are both alcoholics and very heavy smokers, but the feeling is that they are willingly punishing themselves for flaws they possess or crimes they have committed.

Messud’s characters are complex and conflicted: take Francois’ wife, Barbara, for instance, who holds both love and hatred for her husband, but is unwilling to understand his family, but can also can feel pity for them. In great sweeping family epics this development of character can sometimes feel that it’s sacrificed to the larger narrative, but Messud’s depiction of her character’s inner lives feels exacting and honest. The reader may not like Barbara, but they can understand her desire to be more than she is, the housewife for an often unreasonably angry and embittered man.

This Strange Eventful History is an excellent read for someone, like myself, who knows almost nothing about Algerian history. It’s an affecting book, if, at times, a little disjointed by sudden time-jumps. Above anything it’s unrelentingly honest, an occasionally cold look at a lost family, one of many in the last century who were removed from their homeland and were never quite able to settle again.

• This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet, £20)
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