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Saving Life
Claire Messud’s new novel revisits Algeria’s lost colonial past.
“I’m a writer; I tell stories,” reads the first line of Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, a novel based on her own family’s past. Admittedly, that’s not the most promising opener, since everyone from ad executives to life coaches goes around calling themself a “storyteller” these days. “Of course, really,” Messud’s narrator continues, “I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.”
That’s more like it. That’s a meaningful assertion of this novel’s purpose: to preserve and cherish the beauty and sorrow of a way of life since passed from this earth and in danger of being lost to memory. This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.
This Strange Eventful History begins in 1940, with the fall of Paris to the Nazis and the evacuation of Lucienne Cassar and her children back to Algiers, while her husband, Gaston, a naval officer, remains in service. It ends with the death of Lucienne and Gaston’s son, François, at 80 in Connecticut. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one person: François, his Canadian wife Barbara, his sister Denise, Gaston, and François’ daughter Chloe—the only character to claim a first-person voice, and clearly the true “teller” of this tale. Chloe, as did Messud herself, comes into possession of two texts: her grandfather’s 1,500-page history of his family and her aunt’s diary. These serve as the basis for the novel, but much of it also springs from an adult child’s evolving understanding of her two unhappy parents.
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Although Messud has written about the political history of Algeria before, in this novel, politics simmer deep in the background. What drives these characters has little to do with colonialism and its legacy. Chloe refers to “the shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born” in the novel’s prologue; it seems as if it might be an allusion to politics but is revealed, in the final chapter, to be a reference to a shockingly intimate transgression instead. At one point, a young Chloe raises the Algerian issue with her grandfather, who mildly points out that “your happy and free United States of America is, at root, no different from French Algeria—merely, for the colonizers, a more successful iteration.” What really matters to the older Cassars about Algeria is not how or why it changed; it’s that their Algeria is gone. “We might have wished for a happier ending, one that would have made it possible for everyone to live in harmony, to build a nation together,” Gaston adds. “But wishing does not make it so.”
“Wishing does not make it so”—this melancholy observation is one of the abiding themes of This Strange Eventful History. At the center of the family stands one wish fulfilled: Gaston and Lucienne’s marriage, founded on a love Gaston pronounces “the masterpiece of our lives.” Their devotion to each other is genuine and legendary. In every other part of their lives, though, the Cassars are prone to near-fatal miscalculations and deferred dreams. Gaston wants to be a writer but ends up in the navy and, after the war, the oil industry. When de Gaulle summons French troops to Britain to regroup after the fall of Paris, Gaston decides that he dislikes the general’s “arrogance” and will instead follow orders from the collaborationist commanders to repair to a posting in Beirut. These disappointments are echoed in the next generation: François surrenders his academic ambitions for a corporate career, then feels his sacrifice insufficiently appreciated by his wife and daughters. Denise convinces herself that she and a married colleague share a love so secret they’ve never acted on it, only to be disillusioned by a piece of idle gossip.
Most of the major events in the Cassars’ lives—a car accident, breakdowns, courtships, childbirth, the Algerian war for independence itself—happen offstage. Each chapter portrays a slice of time during which a character weathers the ripples caused by life’s disruptions. This is a deliberately antidramatic choice. Messud’s selection of epigraph, a quote taken from Elias Canetti’s Notes From Hampstead, underlines her intentions here. It refers to a man in whose life “absolutely nothing” happened: “All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.”
It’s true that in these vignettes taken from everyday life we can glimpse some of the burgeoning social forces of that time: feminism, multinational capitalism, liberation movements. Gaston and Lucienne are devout Catholics. François is agnostic, flees tradition-bound French society (where the pied-noirs are disdained) for the Americas, and marries a Protestant. Chloe worships art, specifically literature, and finds her grandfather’s world at once familiar and exotic—the latter felt most strikingly just after his death, as friends and family gather in his home while his corpse lies in state in his bedroom. The two older generations in This Strange Eventful History smoke incessantly; the youngest, when grown, beg them in vain to stop and banish them outdoors when they refuse.
But 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—like Messud’s two biggest hits, The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, comment on some highly identifiable aspect of contemporary society. The chattering classes won’t see themselves reflected as discussable phenomena in This Strange Eventful History.
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. Gaston and Lucienne’s marriage, “a sort of courtly love from medieval romance—fated, mythic, enormous,” distorts the expectations of both the married François and the unmarried Denise. As a result, Barbara thinks, the unsatisfiable François had “swallowed and swamped her, belittled and criticized her, had also wept and sworn his devotion—and she’d held her heart an icy shard for decades, had tortured him as he’d tortured her.” She regrets the marriage but somehow can’t extract herself from it. Then, as this generation’s characters age and begin to fail, dementia melting Barbara into a surprising sweetness, François decides “getting older was like inhabiting a mansion you couldn’t afford, so that you were forced to shut down one room after another, eventually entire wings, until you huddled in the kitchen, breaking up the furniture for firewood.” And yet, he is happier. Experience is forever confounding expectations. In much the same way, this novel that, when summarized, seems to be about the smallest of things ends up being about everything.
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