Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
This monumental novel, which is a work of salvage and salvation ... Quilted from scraps of memory treasured in the author’s attic for decades ... Regardless of how much Messud may have drawn from biographical details, though, this novel grips our interest only because of how expertly she shapes these incidents for dramatic effect ... A novel of such cavernous depth, such relentless exploration, that it can’t help but make one realize how much we know and how little we confess about our own families. I strove to withhold judgment, to exercise a little skeptical decorum, but I couldn’t help finishing each chapter in a flush of awe.
Remarkable ... Epic ... Though the novel is both sweeping and intimate, spanning seven decades and six continents, from World War II through the aughts, Messud’s piercing interiority keeps the focus tight, gaining the reader access to her characters’ innermost thoughts. Her attention to detail, memory, and foreshadowing suggest the influence of Tolstoy and Proust, but what’s most evident as we turn the novel’s 400-plus pages is the sense that we are engaging with work that is extraordinarily personal to the author ... Messud gifts us with her family’s journey.
Lyrically written and almost immediately absorbing. As we come to know its characters, it packs a surprising emotional punch, all the more so because of its ambiguous relationship to reality ... Against the backdrop of world-historical upheavals, Messud recounts a bittersweet story of passionate love, frustrated ambitions, emotional dysfunction and, ultimately, survival ... Messud...is a skilled prose stylist. One of her signature moves is a reliance on long, flowing, perfectly composed sentences filled with parallel constructions ... Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life’s challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional rifts.