Halfway through Claire Messud’s sprawling new novel, the 31-year-old François reflects on his grand aspirations: “He wanted to experience everything, from the rocky iguana-covered outcrops of the Galápagos to the sumptuous palaces of Jaipur, from a gelatinous platter of steamed sea cucumber in a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur or a tear-inducing curry in Macao to the Inca ruins of the Yucatán Peninsula, from the ancient churches carved in rock at Lalibela to the dusk falling over Mount Olympus to the sun rising behind the rusty monolith of Ayers Rock as it loomed out of the vast Australian desert—he wanted to see and smell and taste and hear and touch all of it.”
This Strange Eventful History, itself no less ambitious in sweep and scope, 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.
Whether uprooted by geopolitical forces or driven by opportunity to a particular location, the novel’s characters are as formed by their interpersonal relationships as they are by their connection to place. Algiers, Tlemcen, Beirut, Salonica, Toronto, Geneva, Amherst, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cambridge, Sydney, Greenwich, are themselves characters caught up in the family’s continual search, since being exiled from their native Algeria by the war of independence in 1962, for somewhere to call home.
The title of the novel is a reference to Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which he describes the seven ages we traverse while enacting the stories of our lives, of “this strange eventful history.” 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. Particularly poignant is the novel’s rendering of the seventh age as members of the Cassar family succumb to dementia and other ailments.
As I read, now and again I would wonder: Is this a novel? Or is the ambitious, philosophical François actually a profile of Messud’s father? Are the pieds noirs Gaston and Lucienne, whose wrenching, idealized love story dominates the lives of their progeny, her paternal grandparents? Is the bookish, eccentric, secretive Denise her aunt? The disappointed, frustrated, Canadian-born Barbara her mother? Is the patient, sweet Oliver her husband? Is she, herself, Chloe, the family’s natural-born storyteller? Does it matter?
Jenny McPhee 