IN THE PROLOGUE TO CLAIRE MESSUD’S This Strange Eventful History, the unnamed narrator goes to see a witch, a “clairvoyant,” while on holiday in some seaside New England town:
Though I told her I was a writer, she insisted that I was a healer; once she said it, I willed it to be true. Or: I realized I had always willed it to be true, though we’re told poetry makes nothing happen. My desire, as old as humanity, to make words signify.
The witch and the writer are united in a shared act of magical thinking—“a desire . . . to make words signify.” Fortune-telling, after all, is a strange kind of speech act: In saying something, do we will it to be true? And if clairvoyants can see into the future, is Messud’s work, as a novelist, that of conjuring the dead? In the title essay of her 2020 collection Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, Messud describes the work of fiction as nothing less than “magic.” “Spells are essentially a private language,” she explains, and the novelist’s task is to cast personal experience outward, into public texts.
Messud’s novels are known for bringing secrets to light, from her 1995 debut, When the World Was Steady, about two estranged middle-aged sisters, to her intrigue-ridden 2006 bestseller The Emperor’s Children, to, more recently, the betrayals of female friendships behind The Burning Girl (2017). But This Strange Eventful History is arguably her most intimate—a fictionalization of her own family’s secret history as pied-noirs, French colonialists from Algeria. While Messud explored this subject in her second novel, The Last Life (1999), her latest explicitly draws on her pied-noir grandfather’s fifteen-hundred-page unpublished memoir, titled “Everything We Believed In.” The task of translating, both linguistically and narratively, private family history into literary fiction is risky business, especially when that past is stained by the shameful truths of colonization. What is the novelist expected to do in this case? Lie? Given Messud’s personal investments in this history, her imaginative reconstruction is perhaps inevitably partial, uneven—asymmetrical by design.
This Strange Eventful History spans seventy years, from 1940 to 2010, following the family of patriarch Gaston Cassar, a pied-noir whose descendants “lived many places and belonged nowhere.” The novel opens with the bang that precipitates their scattering: “THE GERMANS HAVE CROSSED THE GATES OF PARIS,” we learn on page one of the first chapter, told from the perspective of Gaston’s nine-year-old son François (implicitly Messud’s father). Starting from the child’s vantage is significant, given how much of what follows is refracted through the gauzy halo of a tragic innocence, or willed blindness.
Though the next chapter shifts to the grown-up perspective of Gaston, a naval attaché far from home in Salonica, the view is not much clearer. In these early days of crisis and conflict, communication is difficult. Gaston sends letters to his beloved wife, Lucienne, not knowing whether she reads or even receives them. Caught in the crosshairs of military service, he is our closest proxy to the “eventful history” one typically associates with World War II: Charles de Gaulle’s BBC address, minor dignitaries, Mussolini, Hitler. His first chapter is packed with the stuff of historical fiction—war, politics, a train of proper names I kept looking up lest I mistake a real historical figure for a fictional minor character. I confess I feared, this early into the book, that it was losing me.
Yet even as Gaston moves across the terrain of Great Men, his own internal compass falters. Separated from country and family, Gaston experiences a dark night of the soul:
What am I? he asked the empty sitting room, the dripping night: What am I for? And the litany that he and Lucienne had more than once recited together returned to him: I am Mediterranean, I am Latin, I am Catholic, I am French. These, then, were his anchors; these things, a priori and immutable, defined him, and must determine his actions.
While this taxonomy might momentarily anchor Gaston’s sense of personhood, it alone cannot sustain a plausible or compelling fictional character. Messud’s narrative proceeds to test these “a priori and immutable” categories and, in doing so, to redraw them with what Roland Barthes describes as the necessarily trivial realist details of what we might call fictional life.
This is the magic trick of the book’s second section, which opens in the realm of military history, only to creep into the interiors of domestic fiction—of hearts and houses, and family secrets. The next section jumps thirteen years forward and belatedly presents the perspective of François’s younger sister Denise, who, until now, we’ve largely encountered as his sidekick “Poupette,” who plays soldier to his general, and has an insatiable sweet tooth. The year is 1953, and François is abroad on a Fulbright at Amherst College (like Messud’s father, he is the only scholar in his cohort from Algeria). Meanwhile, Denise is back home with their parents in Algiers, half-heartedly studying Roman law, flirting with officers, and—when we first meet her—preparing for a masked ball whose theme is the year “1900.” Stuck in the past in more ways than one, Denise resembles a Tolstoy heroine; her head is filled with thoughts of historically accurate lace and tulle, and that one “good-looking Muslim boy in the law program.” When her mind drifts to Roman law or contemporary history, it balks:
This stuff would interest François, she knew, but she couldn’t follow it properly—all she knew was that the Muslims gave impassioned, even angry speeches. . . . No, Denise would write instead about something she actually cared about: the plan for the masked ball and her dress.
This is history for girls, one might say, damning and riveting in all its air-headed foibles. Despite the epic proportions of Messud’s novel, its magic is of a muted quality, whose effects are no less mesmerizing for all their modesty or, indeed, pettiness. In fact, this transmutation in narrative concerns—from the patriarch’s nationalist ambitions to the daughter’s frivolous attachments—might also describe Messud’s aesthetic principle.
What begins as a historical novel organized around the political figures of world history progressively shifts to orbit around the protagonists of world literature. The names of French politicians like de Gaulle and Petain are soon replaced by those of philosophers and fiction writers. There are cameos by Jacques Derrida (a schoolmate of François’s), Jorge Luis Borges (whom Denise encounters while briefly working at a bookstore in Buenos Aires), and Salman Rushdie (whom characters read and admire). The novel is populated with references to the twentieth-century European canon, from pied-noir intellectuals like Albert Camus to postcolonial English writers like V. S. Naipaul. The reader progressively exits the world of Great Men for that of Great Books.
This reorientation from historical fact to literary history is narratively strategic, a shift in scope that also enables a series of sidesteps. Messud’s novel turns to questions of literary fiction as its time line approaches the Algerian War, which it notably skips. The elision is telling, even as it is intentional—one that echoes Messud’s family’s avoidance of its colonial past. The Cassars never speak of war in Algeria. Instead, as their saying goes, they “turn the page.”
The novel picks up in December 1962 in the brave new world of Toronto to introduce us to Barbara, who soon marries François and gives birth to Chloe (the implied surrogate for Messud). In trading one colonial nation’s history for another, Messud doesn’t exactly equate them. If anything, the desire seems almost that one—the seemingly gentler Commonwealth iteration—might cancel the other more unspeakable one out. This at least appears to be the logic driving François’s union with Barbara, who, as a Canadian Protestant, represents escape from his own family’s inheritance. Though this, of course, also turns out to be wishful thinking.
Read between the lines—the silent years between 1954 and 1962—and one quickly finds the afterlives of shame. Messud’s novel is populated with characters who are desperately, existentially alone, even when surrounded by spouses, siblings, children. Shame is everywhere just below the surface—a barely tempered guilt that yelps like a traumatized dog, uncertain as to whether they are the cause or victim of abuse.
The symptom, or aftershocks, of colonial trauma rears its head in the novel’s relentless parade of accidents. The book is littered with car crashes: in 1953, a “fatal accident” when Gaston overlooks an oil dig in Algeria; twenty years later, an uncannily similar collision while François manages a plant in Australia; and soon after, Denise’s “single-car accident” in Marseille early one morning. While each is an isolated incident, their cumulative effect on the Cassars feels tantamount to a family curse. The accidents are often absorbed as though personal punishments from God. When François oversees a car crash in Australia, his father relates: “I wasn’t there either. . . . I didn’t witness the accident. I had nothing to do with it, but it’s stayed with me all my life. The guilt, as if somehow I could have done something.” It’s the closest anyone in the family comes to telling on themselves.
In This Strange Eventful History, these accidents enact the return of the repressed, without going so far as to say what it is that has been repressed. For a novel that proliferates the proper names of world historical and fictional characters alike, French Algerian colonial history often feels like the one thing it stubbornly cannot bring itself to name.
There’s something tongue in cheek about titling the story of one’s family past This Strange Eventful History. When it comes to the entanglements of history, “strange” and “eventful” are, of course, often in the eye of the beholder. And Messud’s difficult inheritance lies in how to thread the representational needle: how to give a sympathetic (by which I mean novelistic) account of her family’s experience, while also accounting for the fact that she wasn’t there. The unnamed speaker in the prologue confesses a “wish at last to heal” the “shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born.” But most of what follows is narrated from the distance of the third person, which tracks each member of the Cassar family as their lives unfold in relative isolation, even from one another. These might be honest portrayals insofar as the characters themselves seem unable to perceive the broader histories in which their personal tragedies are embedded. How can they voice, or represent, that which they don’t know? Messud’s narrative evasions are an aesthetic choice, to be sure, and when it comes to world-building, her talent exists in spades. But they are necessarily political, if not also moral, ones as well.
Around midway through the novel, the “I” from the prologue reemerges, unsettling the frictionless illusion of the third-person voice that otherwise carries the novel. The “I,” we soon learn, belongs to a young Chloe, who, at “seven and three-quarters years old,” already shows signs of the novelist in training. “I am trying always to be invisible but better than invisible, if that makes sense,” she confides in us. Chloe is nervous by nature, taking to sleeping outdoors as her family’s “secret night watchman” after a burglary attempt. Even as a child, she imagines that if she can anticipate when bad things will happen, then she might be able to keep her family safe. The difficulty, in the case of the novel she finds herself in, is that so much happened before Chloe was even born. Still, she’ll try her form of magical thinking. If she can say the right words, maybe she can will certain things to be true.
In this way, This Strange Eventful History is not only a historical novel or fictionalized family memoir but also a Künstlerroman. As Chloe grows up, she is, notably, the one who questions and critiques her family members—though such criticism remains largely at the level of character and dialogue. When it comes to narrative and form, what readers are compelled to look at, perhaps against the Cassars’ desires, is what they seem so desperate to overlook. Messud often describes the role of the novelist in terms of witness. Yet while Chloe’s relationship to her family’s history might begin as one of childlike witness, she is inevitably, irrevocably implicated in its legacies as well. Messud—the product, we might even say fulfillment, of her family’s wishes—cannot witness, and compel readers to witness, the Cassars’ strange eventful history without considering the ongoing costs of such an ask.
Has poetry ever not made something happen? Toward the end of the novel, we find Denise sitting alone in her parents’ house in Toulon—the last material vestige of their prior life—wondering what she is made for.
To be a witness, to stand alongside, simply to have lived through these strange, beautiful, appalling times, to have been a night-light, a mirror, a support—that, too, was God’s work, though the ambitious nieces, faithless and perhaps soulless, might disdain it. That wasn’t nothing.
The rest, we might say, is history.
Jane Hu is a writer living in Los Angeles.