The seventy-year saga of a French-Algerian family
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY CLAIRE MESSUD 448pp. Fleet. £20.
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY is both a family saga and an incidental account of French Algeria after the Second World War. As Claire Messud tells us in her author’s note, it is a work of fiction based on facts about her own family. In the novel’s prologue she suggests a personal approach: “I’m a writer. I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives”. Her chosen stories follow the Cassar family from 1940 to 2010 as four generations journey across continents, briefly settling, then moving on. Their diaspora is tracked in chapter headings such as “January 1953: Amherst, Massachusetts”; “December 1962: Toronto, Canada”; “July 1974: Sydney, Australia”; “March 1983: Toulon, France”, and the novel is divided into seven parts, with reference to Shakespeare’s seven ages of man as family members grow old.
The novel opens with the eight-year-old François writing to tell his absent father that the Germans have entered Paris, drawing for him a picture of the trenches they have dug in the garden of their refuge with Tata Jeanne in L’Arba, Algeria. This childish awareness of world events briefly overshadows François’s irritation with his little sister, Denise, his hunger for the remains of the lunchtime baguette and his dislike of the small apartment crammed with boxes and broken chairs. Walking in the narrow streets of the old town, he thinks of Salonica – where they left his naval-officer father – as a beautiful place full of light, and of the Beirut officers’ family summer camp as a precious time of freedom. But “here” is Algeria, “which is France”.
The mixture of the personal and political develops as François grows up. Key historical events take place – Algerian independence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lockerbie, the fall of the Berlin Wall – and the social passage of time is marked by cultural references to the music of Sidney Bechet, the student cult of quoting T. S. Eliot, the popularity of Patricia Highsmith and the influence of Julia Child. Jorge Luis Borges and Raymond Aron appear in person. A wide perspective supports many close-up views of particular places in a way that at times recalls the novels of Annie Ernaux. In Algiers Denise “could hear Maman in the kitchen, preparing supper. Tata Jeanne, knitting in her corner, also heard the water running, the juddering of the pipes”. In Geneva friends host a dinner which includes “Black Forest cake, with its nasty layer of cherry jam, the provincials’ emblem of luxury”. Domestic detail fixes what might be a distant memory in objects such as the beautiful sideboard that has to be put into storage in Salonica and an unwieldy soup tureen, “a vessel of French culture unchanged in its design for centuries”. Odd locations are
