This was wonderfully written book! The characters were frustratingly human. I love books that go through the many decades and really follow each character's life and this book did this very well. It was a great read!

This Strange Eventful History is Claire Messud's best work to date, which is really saying something. A powerful multi-generational novel in the order of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Barkskins, This Strange Eventful History tells the story of the Cassars, driven apart by geopolitical strife, and struggling to maintain their sense of identity. Generations and branches of the family tree are spread out across the world and throughout time they stretch and grow in a myriad of ways, resenting their family ties and expectations while also becoming something new with each new homeland they take on.

This is a big story and it included a lot of detail, a lot of domestic minutiae that some may feel pulls the story down. I felt like all of the specifics of daily life really colored in how much time and space changed the members of the family, in the way that only time and space can do. It was an ambitious novel, largely inspired by Messud's family history, and it was one that will stay with me for a long time.

This is a family saga following several generations of a family, beginning with an Algerian couple deeply in love (Gaston and Lucienne). We follow them as they deal with the vicissitudes of World War II–including separation from each other and their beloved homeland–and then follow their children and grandchild, tracing their personal histories in Europe and America.

This is a slow, beautifully written novel told with intimate detail. Whether we are feeling Gaston’s deeply tender, aching, bodily love for Lucienne, following two children under a hot sun in an unfamiliar city, experiencing the postwar United States through the eyes of an expatriate son, or watching the family patriarch live out his last days in a hospice, we are enfolded in the characters’ living, breathing personal experiences.

THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY is not a novel of plot and events–though historical events dramatically shape this family’s history–but of daily experience within the long arc of history. For those who appreciate novels built out of freshly-rendered, layered detail, this is a worthwhile read.

Many years ago, I read Claire Messud’s book “The Woman Upstairs.” I don’t remember much about it except that it was wonderful. I was happy to receive a copy of Ms Messud’s new novel “This Strange Eventful History” from W.W. Norton and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Spoiler alert: Messud is a terrific storyteller and her writing ability is incredible.

This is an expansive family saga as well as a lesson about the history of Algeria. The story of the Cassar family is told over seven generations, and covering several geographic areas. In 1945, right after World War II, there was a massacre that was a turning point in the relationship between Algeria and France (which had invaded Algeria in 1830. The massacre marked the beginning of the war for Algerian Independence, which concluded in 1962. After Independence, the Cassar family is without a homeland, They were separated during the chaos of the War, and the family history is covered in a beautifully written style.

Gaston and his wife Lucienne have what might look like a perfect love/marriage, but it is stifling to their children Denise and Francois. Francois has his own complicated relationship with a woman named Barbara who is so totally different from his family, they can barely communicate. Their daughter Chloe thinks that telling the long-silenced family stories will make the family heal. Along the way, as the family struggles with many things, we see them move from Algeria to what is now Macedonia, then France, Australia, Switzerland, Toronto, and the U.S.

The events are inspired by (possible a retelling of?) Messud’s own family stories. It’s a treat to read – I love books that entertain me while teaching me about things I never knew. (In this way it reminds me of J. Lahiri’s Low Country). Five stars!

This completely enveloping story tells the tale of three generations of a French-Algerian family from the 1940s to 2010. Gaston and Lucienne wonder if their love is the masterpiece of their lives and little do they know that the perfection of their relationship will set a standard for following generations. As a member of the French Navy, he and his family live around the Mediterranean with the plan to return to their beloved Algiers, But even though the Cassar family has lived in Algeria for more than a century, they must leave when Algeria becomes independent of France. They are unmoored, even though son Francois is gathering advanced degrees across Europe and North America; his attempt to free his family from what he sees as their genteel poverty.

But there's a strangeness--their Gaston's anxious daughter Denise will spend her whole life wondering who and what she is. Francois, their son, marries a woman so different that it's hard to imagine them on the same astral plane. There's anxiety, depression, paranoia in the Cassar family, not so different from many families, yet somehow very different indeed. What if the grandparents' deep and abiding love is more than the family understands?

I was embraced by "This Strange Eventful History" from the first paragraph. Claire Messud's expression of Algeria in the 1920s when Gaston and Lucienne's unlikely love blossoms is entrancing, as is raising their family around the middle east before WWII, and taking refuge in Algeria during the war and seeking a place in the world that has changed. Messud smoothly changes the POV between the characters at different stages of their lives with deep and satisfying result.

It is curious that the last two books I have read developed from a seed in the authors' past. Each author had physical memories passed down to them, giving one the entire history of the family and the other snatches of memories in a shoebox delivered over two decades later.

I enjoyed these brilliant family sagas, Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp and This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud. After reading these incredible novels, I thought that much of the literature I've read recently by older authors telling family stories might be a catalyst for creating a new genre: Aging Adult Fiction (alternative adjectives could include Old, Older, Personal Long History). I like the categorization, and I love the books. The first one for me was Elizabeth Strout, who wrote about fleeing New York with her ex-husband at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Lucy by the Sea. Then there was Ian McEwan in Lessons.

These literary giants wrote about what life looks like when viewed from the prism of what was on offer at the beginning of life and how things played out for all the familial characters. Rapp's large family in Elmira, New York, shook me to the core with hints of horrific events happening close to what seemed like a typical lower middle-class family with four sisters and two brothers. Myra, the oldest daughter, told the main POV chapters, followed by the mother and the brother. As time passed and children were born into this family, Ronin became my hero. Folks, this is not a gentle stroll down memory lane. But it was worth every minute I spent reading this brilliant novel.

On the other side of Aging Adult Fiction is the brilliant global journey Claire Messud creates with Gaston and Lucienne Cassar. The Cassars, deeply in love, find separation from each other painful as Gaston is in the French Navy and Lucienne is trying to parent her children in Algeria. The Cassar family story takes us worldwide, moving for almost a century. They become a family without an actual, natural home to comfort them. The family and their offspring make the best of each situation, but home is an elusive fantasy that will forever elude them. I felt particularly stirred by this story as it contains personal elements.

The heft of Wolf at the Table and This Strange Eventful History gave me so much to reflect on, consider, and learn from. I am in awe of these authors and their work.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of these books.

Wolf at the Table was published on March 19, 2024, by Little, Brown, and Company.


This Strange Eventful History will be published on May 14, 2024, by W. W. Norton & Company.
Share your review!

An amazing family saga encompassing decades in the lives of close-knit yet far-flung family members who never quite get over losing their adopted Algerian homeland. Chock full of intimate history, 20th century politics, and family secrets, this is one to savor.

Over the years Claire Messud has become one of my favorite authors. I appreciate how she combines intriguing premises with beautiful writing. THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY is another great example. Here, Messud takes an epic family story and populates it with complex, fully-dimensional characters that are fascinating to read about. I didn't realize until after I'd finished that the Casser family was inspired by Messud's own family. The movement through time is done with such an expert hand that the reader is completely immersed and along for the ride.
Atmospheric and elegant, I highly recommend this one for fans of literary fiction.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy; all opinions in this review are completely my own.

I love this author and have read all her previous works. This book doesn't disappoint. It;'s wonderful! I love how tha author starts by saying you can jump into a story at any point and that's exactly what she does. She treats her reader as an intelligent human who can fill in the blanks. We get various perspectives over this epic family saga. I appreciate the Algerian- French story so much and hope to see it more. The characters are raw and real. Not all pretty but definitely relatable and as a reader I found myself rooting for all - both sides of the marriage, for example.
Thanks to W.W. Norton and Netgalley for the ARC.

A rock-solid five stars. This is an amazing story — or stories, really — an epic, a sweeping family drama covering several generations of the Cassar family, all of them destined to wander the globe for different reasons — from Algeria to Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki, Macedonia) to France, Australia, Switzerland, Toronto, and various U.S. locations. Though definitely fiction, the story is inspired by the author’s own family history.

This multilayered tale is rich with social and political history and culture (from 1940 to 2010), and it is held together by a network of human relationships that endure despite the odds. We cannot help but grasp the effects, both overt and subtle, of history on character, of actual events and of myths reverberating through the generations.

But what I found most amazing is the psychological richness, that is, Messud’s ability to plumb the depths of her characters’ inner lives, to articulate the complexities of warring impulses, desires, and regrets. I’ve always thought that poets are the ones we must depend on for this kind of subtlety and skill. But Messud is clearly a master. She details the lives of these unremarkable, quite “ordinary” characters with such precision and care that they are lifted from mundane to significant. And the novel to extraordinary. The writing throughout is spectacular.

In the Prologue, Messud (or perhaps her character Chloe; I couldn’t tell) says: “We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.”

It’s a very good idea to reread the Prologue after finishing the book! I read these words over and over as I pondered the beauty and depth of the novel I’d just read. And I thought about my own life, too, the connections, the past and the present flowing together, the hidden music. These are things I feel in my bones, but could never have stated so well, whether straightforwardly or through fiction. The book is a stunning accomplishment. Go into it expecting fullness, depth, paradox, mystery, revelation, and wisdom.

(I only wish the title were easier to remember!)

Many thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and to NetGalley for an advance reader copy of this marvelous book.

Not my favorite Messud. Fine writer she undoubtedly is, and here she works with incredible thoroughness to deliver psychologically rounded portraits of her many characters. And yet… The saga is shapeless, an almost desultory tracing of generation after generation, devotedly done but with no driving impulse other than the surprising fragmentation of this family. Yes, European history did this, to many. And each story has its fascination and intensity, its quirks and characters. Messud inhabits her fiction with the commitment of her own autobiographical fact. Understandable. But not, for me, quite enough.

It is very rare for me not to finish a book. In fact in the last three years, I've probably DNF'ed 2 books. And I've loved Messud's other novels. But this one was just not what I expected and even at the 40% mark I was still struggling to focus. At that point, I decided to call it and not continue with reading the book. I am confident there will be others who love it and her writing, as always, is beautiful but this was just not the right book for me. Since I didn't finish I will not rate it. Please read other reviews and I will absolutely look forward to and read Messud's next book.

with gratitude to W. W. Norton & Company and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This Strange Eventful History is “inspired by” the stories of author Claire Messud’s family (she stresses in an afterword that this is a work of fiction, but that “the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own family”), and initially, I thought that that would be fascinating: the novel begins with a mother fleeing with her children back to the Algeria of their birth at the dawn of WWII as her Navy officer husband watches France fall to the Nazis and awaits orders from his diplomatic posting in Greece. There was a nugget of something very interesting in that — a white family whose ancestors had been in Algeria for over a hundred years, and who thought of themselves as 100% belonging there and also 100% French citizens — and after the African country gained independence in 1962, these “pieds-noirs” had to make a home elsewhere in the world (along with the “harkis”: the reviled indigenous Algerians who had fought on the side of France in the war of independence), and this was a history I didn’t know and was eager to explore. But that’s not really what this novel is about. Instead, this reads like a domestic drama as we follow three generations of the Cassar family — from France to Australia, Argentina, and Canada — and delve into their educations and relationships and careers; flitting among a largish cast of characters in a book that ultimately felt too long. I was often bored, recognised that many long stories were probably included because they were based on real events (although with little literary or entertainment value), and when something startling did happen, I recognised it as one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” situations that probably shouldn’t be included in a novel. This might have worked better as a straight memoir — with plenty of Algerian history included — and while I can’t deny that Messud writes lovely sentences, this was, overall, just okay for me.

An epic tale, the story of the Cassar family, inspired by Messud's own family history. Moving through seven decades, mid-20th century through nearly the present day, and set in many places - Salonica, Algeria, Switzerland, Paris, Massachusetts, Toronto, Australia, and Connecticut - we meet the various Cassars, itinerant Algerians who are separated by WW II, and lose their homeland, alway in search of home, striving, faithful to each other and to their Catholicism, down through the generations, starting with Gaston and Lucienne, who marry and have a perfect idealized love, a love that has its own secret, the stories of their children, Francoise and Denise, and Francoise's marriage to Canadian Barbara, and their two daughters, Loulou, and Chloe, the single first-person narrator, and a writer. Intimate and expansive, their stories fold and unfold, secrets are gleaned and more. Atmospheric and immersive.

Thanks to W.W. Norton and Netgalley for the ARC.

I mean, it's a new Claire Messud -- of course it is going to be amazing. The novel traces the history of a family French settlers in Algeria, starting during World War Two and ending in the 2010s. The family moves around, becomes stateless, and fractures all over the globe, while remaining tightly bound. The elder child becomes a high powered CEO in a faltering marriage while the younger daughter never quite gains independence from her parents. The characters are richly drawn and the language is beautiful. An early contender for all the year end lists.

I have been to Algiers many times, so the book was kind of nostalgic for me. This is the second book I have read about the mid-20th century. It seems our fascination with the world in crisis in the first half of the 20th century is still too strong.

I found the narrative a little more complicated than a pleasurable read. For instance, children under 10 in the opening chapters sounded more like adults than kids. The novel talks about things that many have already written about, like the saving of Jews during the Second World War. The story moved slowly, and many characters lived in just a few pages.

The book can be compared with Amor Towles' novel, "A Gentleman in Moscow." But the art and craft of the two writers are much different, although they talk about the same era and its issues.