You Should Read THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY by Claire Messud
“Everything is connected, if only you could float up high enough into space to see it, if you were God or the Rainbow Serpent.”
Reading Notes
I first came across Claire Messud through her 2006 novel, The Emperor’s Children. I bought the book in hardcover, which was a vote of confidence on my limited college-student budget. There I was, interning at a local newspaper and dreaming of working in publishing. The story of three friends approaching thirty in New York City, that wonderland of the bookish imagination, spoke to both my aspirations and my fears. When I listed it as a favorite book to a coworker, she told me she couldn’t get past Messud’s descriptions. I think she may have used the word “tedious,” at which point my estimation of her, at least on a literary level, plummeted.
Tedious? Never. Messud’s writing is transporting. She could spend thirty pages describing asphalt being patched on a 90-degree day, and I’d still be enchanted. I’d also recognize an obscure emotion in that asphalt patcher that I’ve felt but never admitted to myself. The details Messud writes into her scenes turn the words into landscapes. Reading her novels feels like meandering through an art collection. The images are evocative, the sentences are surprising, the characters are memorable, and the sense of place lingers with me after I’ve closed the cover.
I’ve packed and unpacked this book through eight different moves.
As a case in point, take this sentence from her most recent novel, This Strange Eventful History:
“By breakfast time, the sun had burned the sky clear, its impeccable blue lighter, brighter than the reflecting waves beneath, fringed by occasional whitecaps, dotted by vessels and buoys, a surfacing submarine in the distance, its little men lined upon the deck, all the visible universe a kaleidoscope of blues from Prussian to celeste.”
I am in Toulon, France, when I read that sentence. But that’s not the only place I get to visit. This Strange Eventful History jets from Greece to Algeria, from Canada to Australia, from the United States to France, following three generations of the Cassar family.
Gaston, the patriarch, grows up in Algiers and hopes to raise his family there. But when German forces occupy France, the French colony falls into limbo, and so do the Cassars and thousands of other pied-noirs. François, Gaston and Lucienne’s son, studies in America and chases a sense of home from one country to the next. Toward the end of his life, François reflects:
“What had the expression been, back in the day—his own family was already long gone, but the pied-noirs used to say ‘the suitcase or the coffin’—that was it. And he’d chosen, time and again, the suitcase. Pack up and move on.”
His wife, Barbara, doesn’t appreciate his suitcase-first approach to life. She’s a Canadian homebody who understands neither his restlessness nor his drinking. François, for his part, cannot abide his wife’s cool, reserved demeanor. He longs for the intimate devotion he witnesses between his parents.
Despite often coming at one another from cross purposes, François and Barbara still share the connection of a lifetime lived together. I recently wrote about 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, which is a completely different type of book, but there is a line from it that applies to François and Barbara. In Marie-Helene Bertino’s novel, characters understand each other “innately . . . the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.” François and Barbara may never understand each other on a logical level, but they know each other on an intuitive one, and that alone is worth something.
Seeing her aging husband from afar, Barbara “[feels] a surge of emotion. Was it purely joy or also relief? That they were rich, still, in minutes, inshallah in years, that the now-chill air could still kiss them, that they could fight, dither, joke, read, laugh, complain, be” (346). Like a plane banking as it descends toward land, Barbara and François come home to each other time and again, despite the emotional turbulence they encounter (and create) in each other.
Their daughter, Chloe, forges her life as an American but looks to her family’s past in her grandfather Gaston’s journal, a collection of binders filled with 1,500 pages of handwritten recollections (Messud’s grandfather’s handwritten memoir inspired much of this book). The novel includes multiple points-of-view, but Chloe’s is the only one in the first-person. In the prologue, she introduces herself to us as the (as yet unnamed) narrator:
“I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I also know that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us.”
Nell always steals my reading spot.
I once listened to Min Jin Lee (you should read her, too!) speak about how she likes to begin her novels with a thematic statement that guides her story. If Messud were to do the same, the sentence could be this: Wherever we stand, we see only partially. This Strange Eventful History explores what we can and cannot know about our family members and the ways in which families both shape and challenge our expectations of ourselves, of our futures, of how we want to love and be loved, to know and be known, to remember and be remembered. Messud’s novel argues for the beauty in seeing “only partially,” a view that our human desire for control often resists.
Which brings me back to my young, book-eyed self in 2006, planning a career as an editor or publicist or something, anything, that would grant me access to the literary world. What a partial view I had! My short-lived “dream” job started and ended at an academic imprint, and I’m happier now in the English classroom than I ever was in my publishing cubicle. I never would have guessed that seventeen years later, I’d get the opportunity to workshop a novel of my own with the lovely, talented Claire Messud at Lighthouse Writers in Denver. From where I’m writing now, I have two completed manuscripts, a third half-finished first draft, a handful of short pieces published in hidden online corners, and no agent (yet).
Pete, Jennifer, Ali, me, Patty, Jen, Claire, Monica, Tom, Laura, and Diane at LitFest 2023.
But that's just a partial view. Who knows what I’ll see of my writing life when I look back seventeen years from now?
I’ll guarantee you this, though: I will remember reading This Strange Eventful History. For me, Claire Messud’s books are pinpointed in time, the way people remember where they were for the moon landing (not alive) or 9/11 (a high school sophomore).
When the World was Steady? I was a recent college graduate at the DU Publishing Institute, realizing I couldn’t afford to / didn’t want to / wasn’t brave enough to move to NYC.
The Woman Upstairs? I read it in a single day on a Nook (remember those?) in the first house my husband and I bought together.
The Burning Girl? That was another hardcover purchase, read in our second house during the rare days when our one-year-old’s nap coincided with our three-year-old’s quiet time.
This Strange Eventful History? I read this book over the span of four days during a summer spent ferrying my daughters, now seven and nine, to various camps and activities. During my daughter’s gymnastics class, chalky dust hung in the balcony air, the spring-loaded floor thumped as older girls tumbled across it, and I, transported, read This Strange Eventful History.
You should read it, too.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Length: 423; audiobook runs 16.5 hours
Timeline: 1940 - 2010
Setting: all over! Algeria, America, Australia, Canada, France, Greece (I feel like I should be reciting this list to a tune)
Narrator: multiple narrators; 3rd POV, except for Chloe, who is 1st POV
Fun Fact: Messud’s grandfather left her 1,500 pages of handwritten memoirs, which inspired this novel. She writes, “As noted in the front of this book, this is a work of fiction. But the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own.”
Pairs Well With: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (for WWII literary fiction); The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (for family expectations and misunderstandings); Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (for past-present connections); Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley (for a documentary film that also explores the limits of family narratives)
Book Club
In an interview with Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered, Messud describes her grandfather’s massive memoir as “a remarkable collection of documents” with “photographs and telegrams and letters and so on.” Although he wrote it more than forty years ago, Messud didn’t read it until 2017. She tells Shapiro that her grandfather titled his memoir “Everything That We Believed In.” Compare that title to Messud’s, This Strange Eventful History. How might the title of her grandfather’s memoir fit the characters and events in her finished novel?
At Gaston and Lucienne’s fiftieth anniversary party, celebrated in Toulon, Barbara lashes out at François and questions their own marriage. Messud writes:
“And he raised his eyes, his sad green-and-amber eyes, which carried by now within them a lifetime of hurt and grief and above all the terrible burden of being alone, of not anywhere belonging or being understood or seen lovingly—had their marriage, unlike his parents’, been a mistake, then? He still refused to countenance it—he raised his eyes, wounded all but mortally by her coldness, by the provincial judgmental spirit that looked at him and deemed him irredeemably unacceptable, and he said quietly, ‘How could I have told you what I did not know myself?’” (274)
What do you think is the most significant cause of François’s “terrible burden of being alone”? If you could trace it to three key scenes in the book, which would they be? Why?
Close Reading
“Anyway, they were laughing as Anne Marie told them about Leyris, the handsome second-year Leyris with the soulful eyes and gaunt cheeks, always dapper in his trench coat with a cigarette drooping from his lip, hurrying into lectures late or out early as though he had more important places to be, but he’d come up behind her that morning when she was checking the notices on the bulletin board outside Boulours’s class, and standing at her should where she could barely see him out of the ocean of her eye, so that when he spoke to her she was forced to turn and there he was, his face so close to hers, she couldn’t help but stare at him, his long curled eyelashes and those sad eyes like an Italian film star, and he’d said, ‘Where did we meet?,’ which was also like a line from an Italian film because they’d never met, it was far more mundane than that and he had to have known it— ‘Oh my God, he was flirting, such a flirt!’ squealed Marie José, delighted, leaning in open-mouthed as if Anne Marie’s story were manna itself, and Denise was asking at the same time, speaking over Marie José: ‘What did you say? What did you say?’”
First: What a gorgeous, ambitious, singular sentence! I love the way this passage conveys the youthful energy of Denise and her friends in Algiers. Starting with “Anyway” puts us immediately in the scene, as if we are walking alongside these girls. Although Marie José “squeal[s]” that Leyris is a flirt, the physical details that Anne Marie focuses on—his “soulful eyes,” the “cigarette drooping from his lip,” those “long curled eyelashes”—suggests Anne Marie is a flirt as well. She enjoys holding court over her friends with her tales of romantic interest. The tone in this scene reminds me of that Gen Z creation: IYKYK (if you know you know). These girls speak in the rambling shorthand of friends with shared memories and inside jokes.
Pulled out on its own, this sentence may suggest that Anne Marie is the narrator, but the chapter is actually written in Denise’s third-person point-of-view. When I read it in context, what strikes me most is the way Denise disappears. Anne Marie is telling a story not only to inform her friends but to entertain. Marie José and Denise compete for her attention, talking over each other to tease the details out of Anne Marie. Not until the very end of this sentence do we hear Denise, which is indicative of her reserved personality. Denise suffers from loneliness and unrequited love throughout her life. This moment, when she should be happy with her friends but still struggles to have her voice be heard, foreshadows the literal degradation of her voice after a lifetime of smoking.
Creative Writing
Creative Nonfiction: The prologue opens with this line: “And so this story—the story of my family—has many possible beginnings, or none . . . . It doesn’t matter so much where this story begins as that it begins. And if, as I’ve come to understand, the story is infinitely expanding, rather than a line or a thread, then wherever I start is merely that—not the beginning but a mere moment, a way of happening, a mouth . . .”
Describe a significant moment or event from your life. Don’t overthink it—spend 10-15 minutes creating the scene. Then, reread what you have. Choose a moment in the middle and write the scene again, using that as your beginning. What changes? Try again: This time, start writing after the event has already occurred. How does your perspective shift with each new “way of happening”?
Fiction: In 1978, three generations of the Cassar family reunite in Toulon, France to celebrate Gaston and Lucienne’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. The family reflects on those both present and gone: “The missing not forgotten, then, but present in the seas’ rhythms, in the night air, along with the unspoken miracles of those whose cheeks could still be stroked, hands held, those who might have slipped into the realism of the shades but had been stayed, for a time, by love, or God, or Fate.”
Use a party—an anniversary, say, or a wedding—as a setting for a family tableau. You might include generations, like the Cassars, or perhaps a web of found family. Who is disappointed or bitter? Who is grateful and kind? What tensions exist beneath the surface? Choose one or two characters to focus on. Explore how their lives match up with their expectations when viewed through the magnifying glass of a ritualistic event.
Sentence Study
“Remember this moment, she told herself, remember this day, as Fanchette teed up, wiggling her wide bottom like a settling hen, while Antoinette whispered something to her sister and Estelle giggled, her mouth slightly open and her tongue pressing at the fabulous gap between her teeth, all of them so casually and happily being together, belonging together, still young, their lives still ahead, as a white-tipped plane flashed overhead in the glaucous, honeyed summer afternoon light, and, a mere second later, its roar split the air”
Denise’s friends take her golfing in Buenos Aires. They’ve noticed she’s been withdrawn and want to cheer her up. This sentence connects back to a line from the prologue, when Chloe’s voice tells us that “[t]he past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us.”
In this moment with her friends, Denise tells herself to “[r]emember this moment” because she knows that she is both living in it and creating a memory. Like her niece Chloe, Denise is aware of how “all time exists at once.” Messud conjures the feeling by including many small, overlapping gestures in this tableau. Fanchette “wiggle[s] her wide bottom,” Antoinette “whisper[s] something to her sister,” and Estelle “press[es] her tongue” against her teeth. These details alone capture the girls’ movement like a candid snapshot.
Then, to create the effect of being both in and past this moment in time, Messud includes the detail of the “white-tipped plane” above them, reminding Denise that just as they are invisible to the passengers above, this moment will soon be a fleeting memory. The juxtaposition of the friends (micro view) and the plane (macro view) convey Denise’s sense of smallness as she works to overcome her latest mental health setback.
