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.
Ambitious and compelling ... What gives this novel its exceptional vitality is that Messud never allows collective issues to take precedence over individual lives ... Messud’s writing at the start is formal, her tone detached. Only gradually does her prose relax, her language reflecting a loosening up of social convention, and also hinting at a breakdown of the walls of secrecy that have hidden her characters from us.
A cosmopolitan, multigenerational story that, paradoxically, sticks close to home ... The novel certainly has the stately sweep and weight of a magnum opus, but I don't think Messud is simply praising her own accomplishment. As I've said, this is a novel about displacement, both political and personal. And, you have to have lived a while to write, as Messud does here, with such intimate melancholy about how time messes with us all, displacing us from earlier versions of ourselves.
