"[Messud] is a skilled prose stylist. One of her signature moves is a reliance on long, flowing, perfectly composed sentences filled with parallel constructions, perhaps an analogue to the flow of history…Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life’s challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional rifts…As she navigates her own complex, beclouded legacy, Messud’s generosity of spirit prevails. "Sometimes we feel alone,'" her alter ego, 7-year-old Chloe, tells herself, wise beyond her years, "but we are always more closely connected than we think."
Los Angeles Times - Julia M. Klein
"It’s almost unbearably moving, wise and full of the most gorgeous prose."
"This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment—rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family—and we suspect as we read it, her own—is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite."
"A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become 'colonized' by family."
"Ambitious in sweep and scope, [This Strange Eventful History ] 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, the brutal legacy of colonialism, how memory and denial shape us, how family history and world events coincide and collide…Messud, often praised for her ability to capture the tiniest, most telling details of her characters’ lives and environments, here comprehensively portrays her own characters’ seven decades…Throughout her novel, Claire Messud allows us to share in François’s expansive intellectual inquisitiveness, proving in her lyrical, thought-provoking prose that she is very much her fictional father’s daughter."
"Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them."
The Atlantic - Tope Folarin
"What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time—implacable and indecipherable—befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know."
"Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century, and inspired by Messud’s own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound."
"[Messud's] novels frequently feature characters who are adrift and unmoored, with complex lineages that scan as vaguely foreign wherever they are. We watch others try to discipline those unruly identities, awkwardly forcing their historical baggage into cramped boxes. In This Strange Eventful History , Messud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction, as if in defiance of this tendency. The novel brims with details, many likely gleaned from a fifteen-hundred-page family history, titled "Everything That We Believed In," that her paternal grandfather left behind. Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it"
The New Yorker - Jennifer Wilson
"The big questions are here, about family and colonialism and grief. But the real promise of a 425-page family epic is that it will provide an emotional punch, too. On that, it delivers…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. "Literary language is a kind of spell," she writes in the introduction of her 2020 essay collection. Similar to one character’s "beautiful French, like his cravat, somewhat old-fashioned, but so elegant," her style comes to seem like a purposeful constraint. This Strange Eventful History might use some old tricks, but it’s hard not to be hypnotized"
New York Magazine - Emma Alpern
"Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike," but "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Sometimes, though, unhappiness has to do with what is universal, and this is what Messud is especially adept at conveying…In writing this breathtaking ode—and lament—of a novel, Messud honors her ancestors by interrogating the circumstances that shaped them and the questions that plagued them. "
Boston Globe - Leigh Habor
"Claire Messud’s profound and exacting new novel is an epic involving several generations of a diasporic family on a volatile earth—a fictionalised version, as the prologue tells us, of her own family’s wanderings, an attempt at the imaginative retrieval of beloved persons and memories lost in the ruins of time."
"A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century; call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras; call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory."
"There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud’s latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval…Sold."
"A novelist of exquisite artistry and insight draws on her own family history in this gorgeously realized, acutely sensitive, cosmopolitan, century-spanning, multigenerational saga…Messud captures life's wheels-within-wheels on every incandescent page."
Booklist (starred review) - Donna Seaman
"[This Strange Eventful History ] is slow and cumulative, skillfully building to a low but steady boil while delivering quiet, elliptical moments that nevertheless linger in the mind…[Messud's novel] is 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 relevance."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Based on Messud's own family journey, this sprawling saga reaches from 1940s French Algeria to modern-day Connecticut, illuminating the toll of war, displacement and one shocking secret on successive generations of a clan buffeted by history. Evocative and eye-opening."
People Magazine - Kim Hubbard
"Claire Messud has transformed three generations of her family's story into a tour de force in This Strange Eventful History …all around them are the upheavals of the 20th century, but though Messud is working on a grand canvas, her skill is in miniature. History is dazzling in its fine-tuned character studies…all beautifully realized. This is a pointillist novel, profound in its portrayal of strains, bonds, and heartbreak."
"Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one…After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction…Each section is absorbing…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…How attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been."
"Claire Messud is an author who perfectly pairs scale and intimacy in her prose. Inspired in part Messud’s family history, This Strange Eventful History is an epic cross-generational story that follows a pieds-noirs family separated in the chaos of World War II and made adrift without a homeland after Algerian independence. The novel’s ingenuity and ambitious scope can’t be underestimated; This Strange Eventful History is nothing less than a literary event, sure to surprise and delight at every turn."
"This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl , Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud’s grandfather."
BookPage (starred review)
"The always incredible Claire Messud's own history helped inspire this engrossing story, which follows a complicated family—as if there were any other kind—across decades and around the world, as legends are made, secrets are buried, and truths come out in the most unexpected of ways. It's a touching, skillfully crafted work that reminds us of the ongoing stories of which we're all a part."
"Claire Messud turns her family's history into a masterpiece…This Strange Eventful History is 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."
"This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl , Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud’s grandfather."
"This Strange Eventful History relates the story of the Cassars, a family of French Algerian origin who were displaced after World War II and Algerian independence. Author of The Emperor’s Children, The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl , Claire Messud crafts complex characters and builds tension by exploring the intensity of their emotions. This family saga has the added intrigue of being inspired in part by a family memoir written by Messud’s grandfather."
Most Anticipated Fiction of 2024 Book Page
"There are few genres more enjoyable than the sprawling, decade-spanning family saga (especially in the hands of a brilliant novelist). Claire Messud’s latest novel tells the story of an Algerian-born French family from 1940 through 2010 as they navigate personal and political upheaval…Sold."
Most Anticipated Books of 2024 Lit Hub
"Deeply intertwined with the sociopolitical upheaval of the 20th century, and inspired by Messud’s own family history, this sweeping narrative is as intimate as it is profound."
The Most Anticipated Books of 2024 Oprah Daily
05/01/2024
Messud's (Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write ) newest is a semi-autobiographical novel of her own family history, an epic generational story that sprawls across the world and from the 1940s to 2010. The fictional Cassars were what the French call "pieds-noirs," ethnically French but born and living in Algeria, until the upheaval of World War II and Algeria's independence from France left them without a homeland. Each chapter is part of the larger picture of the Cassar family history, told from one character's perspective. The anxiety and emotional turmoil the whole family feels about no longer having a home is a thread woven throughout the novel, forcing each character to grapple with where they think they belong in the world. Much of the narrative revolves around the daily lives of different generations of Cassars. Some events, such as deaths and marriages, are momentous, but much of the plot is incremental and domestic in nature, and the inner lives of characters are more important than physical action. VERDICT A meticulous tale about one family, rich in historical detail. Recommended for historical fiction readers who enjoy epic family histories and cerebral characters.—Kristen Stewart
★ 2024-02-03 A family rides the waves of current events and personal conflicts across three generations.
Readers of Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020) will recognize the autobiographical elements in Messud’s novel, but they are less important than the compelling way she has reinvented her family as fully fleshed fictional characters. Gaston and Lucienne Cassare, a French Algerian couple uprooted first by World War II and then by Algerian independence, embody for their son, François, and daughter, Denise, a loving companionship so total that both children will spend their lives looking for its equal. Denise, whose personal attachments rarely work out, clings to her parents’ devout Catholicism; François might have made a home in America—“its energy, its freedom, its carelessness” thrill him as an Amherst undergraduate—but his Canadian wife, Barbara, objects. Their peripatetic marriage survives her extended absences to care for her dying father in Toronto and the damage inflicted on his business career when she insists they leave Australia, but he can never get over the fact that Barbara always holds part of herself apart from him. Messud portrays the Cassares at key moments in their lives, beginning in Algeria as France falls in June 1940 and ranging across continents and seven decades: Geneva, Toronto, Toulon, Buenos Aires, suburban Connecticut, and New York—wherever their varied fortunes take them, with the author’s fictional stand-in, aspiring writer Chloe, and her sister, Loulou, entering as schoolgirls in 1970s Sydney. Messud paints compelling portraits of internal conflicts and tangled relationships, dropping along the way tantalizing references to crucial events that will be clarified later, in a rich narrative that defies summary. The novel reaches a poignant climax as the older generations age and die: Gaston and François succumb to physical ailments; Lucienne and Barbara descend into dementia. The marriage of François and Barbara, bitterly antagonistic but ultimately loyal, is perhaps the novel’s most wrenching depiction, but Messud’s gimlet eye and quietly masterful way with words make every character and incident gripping.
Brilliant and heart-wrenching; Messud is one of contemporary literature’s best.