In his retirement in the 1970s, my grandfather Gaston Messud wrote, for my sister and me, a memoir of his and our grandmother’s life between 1927 and 1946. Reading parts of that memoir twenty years ago, was, for me, the beginning of this project. (I read all of it, well over a thousand handwritten pages, only in 2017.)

The seed of Claire Messud’s 2024 novel, This Strange Eventful History, was her engagement with her grandfather’s legacy – this massive trove of family history and the question of what to make of it. It’s worth pointing out that while the bookends of the first chapter and the epilogue take place within the timespan covered by her grandfather’s narrative, the vast majority of the book reconstructs the seventy years from her family’s origins in Algeria to 2010, relatively close to our present moment.

The sweep of passing decades gives Messud the chance to paint the development of her family’s mythology over several iterations of theme and variation against the canvas of world history. On the individual scale, Gaston and his wife Lucienne’s powerful love for one another imprints their children with an impossible idealism in the way they form attachments over the course of their lives. Both children look back on their parents’ love with a mixture of tenderness and resentment that they bring to their own lives and loves. And on the historical scale, the family becomes subject to the contingencies of political winds of change as they flee colonial Algeria after independence.

The Cassars (the fictional adaptation of the family) are both intensely romantic and lonely, nostalgic and forward looking, cosmopolitan vagabonds who live their quiet lives with passion and angst. As the novel progresses, at times it feels like the central subject that Messud wanted to write about was her parents’ unhappy marriage, alternating chapters between her fictional mother and fictional father with affection and bitterness. In one scene, the young Chloe – who is the author’s stand-in – walks in on her father alone in his room, swigging gin out of the bottle during a Christmas celebration. The scene is written from the father’s perspective with equal parts judgment and sympathy, perhaps written to help expurgate the pain of growing up with such a curmudgeonly afflicted father as Francois Cassar.

The book opens with a lyrical reflection from grown-up Chloe (who also utters the title phrase from Shakespeare in another passage) where she addresses the framework of the narrative itself:

I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we only see 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 on itself.

I love this opening for the way that it embraces “middle-ness” – the partial view that we have of our lives. The gift of her grandfather’s thousands of pages of narrative offered Messud another way of telling the story. His own frustrated ambition to be a novelist probably contributed in some way or another to her own choice of vocation. But first, this buried desire had to be transmitted through history and the lives of her parents.

The prose is thick with lush descriptions, streams of consciousness, and intellectual reflections – fluently shifting between sensual and cerebral. As we read, we live through the emotions and experiences of a cast of intelligent and emotional characters, witnessing their highs and lows. Here’s a characteristic passage from the point of view of Barbara, Francois’s Canadian wife, who reflects on whether she has made the right decision to marry:

As she stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, scrubbed the pots and put away the leftovers in containers in the fridge, leaving for last the washing of the wedding tureen, with its pommel-handled lid, a vessel of French culture unchanged in its design for centuries, she acknowledged, for just a moment, in her marrow, that just as she had been unable to resist the ties themselves—just as she had capitulated to marriage and, eventually, to motherhood–even as she struggled against her bonds, she couldn't fully regret any of it, any of them.

We can almost feel the soap suds and feel the tide of rumination – the perfect way that this activity crystalizes both Barbara’s knowledge of how gender roles have proscribed the course of her life and her grudging accommodation to the shape of her life. The theme continues in later passages, where the ambivalence she feels toward Francois is described with Jamesian power and richness.

Chloe’s passages work somewhat differently. As she has announced at the outset of the book, she is the writer. She fabricates meaning and articulates connections that might have remained implicit without her voice. She muses:

This, too was life: if the train carried in itself the sounds and textures of history, all of us anonymous in the dark, all of us trapped on the thundering rails, hearing even in the European stations the mourn-ful cries of separated families or the military march of troops echoing through the air, floating beneath the cavernous ceilings with the greasy-winged pigeons-We are all the same, the echoes whispered, History is always around us and in us…

Near the end of the book, there’s a scene where Chloe stumbles upon several troves of family history in her grandparent’s storage space, including both the family history itself and her aunt’s anguished journal from her time in Argentina. The scene is a clever sort of recapitulation of the origin of the book itself, both recalling the prologue and looking forward to a fictional version of herself writing a fictional version of the book we’re reading.

The final pages of the book offer a small twist that causes us to re-examine the entirety of the family’s history. I’m not going to give away the twist but it reframes the family’s origins in Algeria and makes us see what was most central to their identity was perhaps forced upon them as a matter of circumstance. I was curious whether the secret revealed in the final pages was real or invented, though it seems like it must have been invented because of the way that it ties together the threads of the novel into a tight little whirlpool. Perhaps we’ll never know – but Messud’s novel gives us an opportunity to think about how narrative form situates us in relation to personal and historical traumas, both in what we cherish and what we feel most dissatisfied by.