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.
Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one, This Strange Eventful History ... As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed — no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling ... I wasn’t entirely persuaded by the link to political entitlement and was hungry for a longer comment on the meaning of the couple’s secret. This lingering wish was a mark of how attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been.
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.
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.
It is earnest, rigorous, and indebted to modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; you could call it a professor’s novel ... There are parts in the middle of This Strange Eventful History that read syrupy slow, and it’s impossible not to catch some of the characters’ weariness and sadness ... It can be very funny ... The idea that literature itself can offer absolution may be as quaint and passé these days as the Great American Novel, but Messud’s steady belief in it is intoxicating.
Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction ... Brims with details ... One could accuse Messud of treating her family’s history like a family heirloom, which is to say, over-delicately ... The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact, but Messud trusts her readers to bite down.
Sprawling ... Itself no less ambitious in sweep and scope, spans seven decades from 1940 to 2010, and chronicles in a stunning, meticulous prose three generations of the Cassar family as they whirl about the globe ... Messud insightfully explores the complex themes of conflicting claims of identity, the trauma of rootlessness, the power of family secrets to corrupt and corrode across generations ... Poignant.
Expansive ... Messud’s patiently detailed personality studies acquire emotional force ... A kind of epic of inaction, and while it finely illustrates the predicament of the diasporic pieds-noirs, the novel also possesses a broader generational resonance.
Beguiling, deftly crafted ... Messud's sentences are consistently elegant, if seldom electrifying ... Moves like a broad river, a Nile or a Mississippi: slow and majestic, rich with the layers of its watershed. It's not a propulsive read, but one to savor, line by line, distilling its mysteries ... Assuredly her masterpiece.
This latest work will be ambrosial, brimming with long passages that attempt to capture the evanescent sensations of life — touch, taste, sounds, smells, the ever-shifting register of light. Others may get lost in dense, descriptive passages that roll on and on ... Yet all in all, the book is a masterful achievement, a somber, joyous meditation on the consolations and disappointments of empire, nation, faith and family.
The power of this novel, which is considerable, has little to do with the historical events that flicker through it. Its effects cumulate, each scene enriching the one before it, the characters with their idiosyncratic delusions and habits and yearnings gradually acquiring the dimensions of full human beings much like the impossible and precious people we live with every day. This blossoming requires some patience from readers more accustomed to novels that wear their talking points on their sleeves or that ... By the end, however, the Cassars came to feel almost as real to me as my own relatives. The novel has the attentiveness—Chloe’s attentiveness—that could be inspired only by the compassion and exasperation found in inescapable bonds.
A wide perspective supports many close-up views of particular places in a way that at times recalls the novels of Annie Ernaux ... Messud provides narrative nudges, noting in parenthesis what is to come for a character, as well as revealing a long-held secret of a family scandal. She also suggests that the new generation will bring hope and clarity. Her strong prose style holds the mosaic together ... he paints lyrical views of mountains and lakes and snow-covered hills, but also makes use of dialogue and telephone conversations ... What the novel really excels in is powerful moments when prosaic events are pierced with feeling. Claire Messud’s description of a fleeting tenderness between Barbara and the unsteady François, many years into their often fractious marriage, infuses the everyday with the transcendent.
Wide as Messud’s scope is here, her formal approach is more modernist than realist ... As it turns out, Chloe has a reason for not wanting to look backward. Despite her commitment to telling her family’s whole and unvarnished story, there’s one thing she struggles to reveal. Messud uses this struggle to create suspense in a novel that otherwise would have no plot beyond the sequence of events that make up Gaston’s, François’s, and Denise’s lives ... Messud maintains this balance of sympathy and clear-sightedness ... Messud pulls off something rare here: Her ending turns the whole book on its head.
Messud renders each inner and outer life in finely detailed, scintillating prose ... Messud captures life’s wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page.
Enthralling ... With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her descriptions of people and places are beautiful, precise and illuminating. Her understanding of the human soul is profound. This is reason enough to read the novel.
Epic ... Messud's chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and 'these strange, beautiful, appalling times' in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read.
Exquisite ... In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is a wonder.
