What I thought was a family saga exploring the impact of geographical dislocation, narrated in multigenerational voices across decades, turned into something quite different by its end. Making the twist even more shocking is the sense that
Claire Messud--who found an unpublished memoir a thousand pages long among her grandfather's personal effects after his death--is coming clean about a long-buried secret to demonstrate how individuals and non-blood relationships can be scarred by an unthinkable situation that preceded their births.
Gaston Cassar, the patriarch of This Strange Eventful History, is in a pickle when it begins: born in colonial Algeria and now serving in the French Navy, he decides to stay in Salonica instead of joining General Charles DeGaulle's resistance in London, after his wife and two children have taken refuge from the Nazi invasion with relatives in their homeland. Post Algerian independence, the pied noir family finds themselves in Paris before their peripatetic lives play out over the next 70 years as France fades from global relevance, oil turns into gold and English becomes the lingua franca.
My friend, you’ve no idea—the Brits, the Americans, they’re all over this industry, it’s in their hands. What was the IPC, after all, all those years ago? Even our Algeria project is in significant partnership with Shell—and what do you know about the Dutch? Have you ever met a Dutchman who’ll speak French? It’s almost a matter of principle for them, solidarity with their Belgian cousins. No, it’s the reign of chewing gum and Churchill from here on out.” Rondot twirled his infernal coin again. “We lost the war, my friend. It’s all very well for de Gaulle to pretend otherwise, and who can blame us for wanting to believe him? But behind the scrim, the facts are as they are: to the victor go the spoils. The future is in oil, and the future is in English.
Francois strives no less than his father to succeed in an unwelcoming world--speaking English with a French accent almost as heavy as his smoking--climbing the corporate ladder in Canada, Australia and his beloved United States. His younger sister Denise, introduced as a fantasist from childhood, struggles with fewer opportunities available to single women, until she moves to Buenos Aries to join their parents and meets a would-be mentor.
In this way, she [Fraulein Lili Lebach] seemed to Denise a model of how to proceed in exile: she had retained within her and miraculously now, all these years later, without bitterness, the splendors of her youth; but she had moved on, and away, from that past. She was an émigré and a cosmopolite, a citizen of the world, and she carried her griefs—legion and enormous—locked inside her. But she was determined to live, fully.
Both Francois and Denise are haunted by their parents' idealized marriage which Gaston describes as "the masterpiece of their lives." Francois impulsively marries Barbara, a Canadian with whom he shares a lifelong sexual attraction, if little else. They literally come from different worlds and in the novel's most heartbreakingly mysterious moment Barbara declares I never would have married you if I'd known, and turns her back on him in bed. He protests that he didn't know either, but the reader cannot help but wonder if his youthful depression, blamed on his exile from sunny Algiers to gray Paris, indicates otherwise.
Messud writes more persuasively about the inner lives of her female characters, perhaps because they are less constricted by the rigid expectations that make Francois so miserable. Her chapter about Denise's short-lived Argentinian happiness in particular masterfully evokes a crippling denial typical of its time and place. When Chloe, clearly a stand-in for the author, discovers a cache of her spinster aunt's delusional love letters to her unavailable (and ultimately disappointing) soulmate, she muses at length in the first person, the only character to do so.
When I read a novel or watched a film, I could so often predict what would happen next. Plot felt to me inevitable. But in life, turns were not programmed or decided, and we had agency over only some small aspects of our stories. Implacable chance ruled. As passengers, we could not determine whether the plane crashed; or as patients, whether the operation proved fatal. Imagining did not make it so—thank goodness. But how much of our lives did our minds control? And what of love? Of what had my aunt’s long love consisted? Was it the less real for existing only in her head? Or were her years in love as wonderful, for her, as, well, being in love? What of my parents’ love, if love there was? They had now had a long and very real life together, shared hours and weeks and years, but was their love therefore more real than my aunt’s, or was it simply that their often unhappy life together was more real?
Choe's spin on her aunt's devotion and her parents's relationship is the kindest possible interpretation, to say the least, given Messud's refusal to romanticize her principal characters' lives and her curious lack of detail about Lucienne, the family matriarch. It's almost as if grandma didn't count because she didn't share the gene for writing down the secret of her own marriage, which appears to have been based solely on gratitude for having been rescued from life as a single woman in a man's world. Earlier in the novel, with the perspective of her own incipient adulthood, the author empowers young Chloe to share her own hard-earned wisdom.
Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can’t choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain . . . The boat, on this late-twentieth-century crossing, was far from stabilized, and many things fell from their places. But, inshallah, there would be a next voyage, and a next, traveling forward into an invisible future. None of us could predict where those things, or ourselves, might land.
So true, like everything else about Messud's unique family history, as sad as it is strange and eventful.
