The intergenerational project of American novelist and creative writing professor Claire Messud is complete with her latest novel This Strange Eventful History, longlisted for both the Booker and Giller Prize 2024. Spanning continents and decades — it begins in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, in Greece), 1940, and ends in Connecticut, 2010 — the book tells a story of war, displacement, and colonisation through the experiences of the Cassars, who are modelled on the author’s family members. The intricate details Messud supplies in this mesmerising work of fiction are “based in part on her aunt’s diaries and an unpublished 1,500-page memoir handwritten by her grandfather”.
The patriarch, a pied-noir (people of French descent born in colonial Algeria) — Gaston Cassar, a naval attaché in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) — is forced to bid farewell to his family, which includes his wife Lucienne, son François, and daughter Denise. He doesn’t know that they’ve safely reached Algiers and are staying at his brother Charles’ home. As he gets overwhelmed by larger political forces — it’s World War II; France has fallen — and a sense of duty towards his motherland, he reminiscences about the most personal moments he shared with his wife.
“Lucienne was his anchor, but now he had to rely on himself.” This grief, as a result of separation, a forced displacement, is one of the central themes of the book. Sample its inevitability from a Jewish merchant Hernandez’s reflection in the novel: “But our people have always understood uncertainty, and have lived with it. We expect it. We live always as though we might have to leave at a moment’s notice.”
A Shakespearean touch
Several such occasions present themselves in the book, and the characters are forced to make decisions. During these deliberations, readers get an insight into moral dilemmas. For instance, as a child, François wonders whether it would be “dishonest, like a lie, to draw something that wasn’t there” while writing to his father. And as an adult, he is seen contemplating whether he should stay by the side of his dying father-in-law at his wife’s home. Not to be dismissed is the sense of voyeurism one experiences reading this story because we know this family saga has a kernel of truth in it. However, it doesn’t read like a memoir despite the painful recollections, minor details, desires, joys, and afflictions.
American novelist Claire Messud | Photo Credit: Getty Images
There are obvious influences of the classics in the sense that Messud’s writing defamiliarises the familiar and vice versa, rendering her novel with a quality that allows readers to live “through with the characters” as the masterful Chinese writer Yiyun Li notes. The biggest, however, appears to be Shakespeare. For example, the title of the book is borrowed from the monologue — ‘All the World’s a Stage’, one of the most famous speeches in theatre — by Jaques in As You Like It.
The eventfulness or eventless-ness of the stories in this novel may be up for deliberation but not the strangeness it employs in portraying familial relationships, signalling the author’s commitment towards storytelling. “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself,” she writes in the Prologue. However, any story is always “partial”, as Messud notes, and her novel is a grand example of this belief.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist. Instagram/X: @writerly_life
This Strange Eventful History
Claire Messud
Fleet
₹899
Published - September 13, 2024 09:30 am IST
