This Strange Eventful History
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
*A TIME MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 *
*AN OPRAH DAILY MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024*
*AN OBSERVER 2024 PICK*
*A GUARDIAN 2024 PICK*
'One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller' Yiyun Li
June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.
A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Messud (The Burning Girl) draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country's 1954–62 war of independence. Patriarch Gaston Cassar and his wife, Lucienne, whose seemingly perfect marriage contains within it a scandalous secret (the particulars of which dovetail artfully in Messud's telling with the lingering stain of colonialism on France and the pieds-noirs), make peace with their displacement by clinging to their Catholic faith. Their daughter, Denise, follows her parents from Buenos Aires to Toulon, France, nursing a series of unrequited loves and a fierce sense of injustice. Her older brother, François, earns a spot at one of France's most prestigious lycées but can't bear the damp cold of Paris, or the shame of being from a colonial outpost the rest of the nation is ready to abandon. He makes his way to America on a Fulbright fellowship and then to Oxford University, where he meets Barbara, a Canadian student drawn to his Gallic "insouciance." Their marriage strains, but never breaks, under the weight of their cultural differences and Barbara's frustrated ambitions. In the novel's final sections, their youngest daughter, Chloe, reckons with the older generations' physical and mental decline, and with her own sense of rootlessness. 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.
