Breakaway Books

Authored by Claire Messud; Published May 2024; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

What makes for a happy family? In This Strange Eventful History, a blissful marriage seems to turn into nothing but misery in just a generation—and it’s difficult to place the blame.

This Strange Eventful History follows the Cassar family from the 1930s into the new millennium through three generations. The Cassars are French Algerians who, following Algerian independence, are never permitted to return. They settle instead in France, Argentina, Canada and the United States, but they all long for home in Algeria. While father and son achieve a degree of financial success, unhappiness pervades the son’s (Francois) marriage, and his sister (Denise) never quite manages to marry or start a career, suffering from depression. 

I wish that the novel had spent way more time with the Cassars in Algeria. Having read many, many historical fiction novels covering World War II, I was intrigued by the perspective of those living in North Africa during the conflict. I would have loved to read more about the Cassar patriarch’s actions and feelings during the conflict for Algerian independence. But far too quickly, we moved beyond the war and out of North Africa—it felt like at least half the book covered the ugliness of aging and middling marriages. While the eldest Cassar (Gaston) and his wife (Lucienne) enjoyed a miraculously blissful marriage, neither his son nor daughter were able to recreate it, and it felt as though the author was messaging the idea that either a marriage is blessed, problem-free, and unconditionally joyful, or pure misery. The contrast felt odd.

Francois’s antipathy toward France, especially after he decamps to the US, sparks an Old vs. New World rivalry that underlies much of the second half of the novel, a constant debate about how they differ and which is better. Francois‘s perception that he has been rejected by France, and then by his wife and children, makes him a tragic figure, not altogether easy to sympathize with. At times, it feels like he gets in the way of his own happiness, but I was always wondering: is this because he has been unrooted from his true home? Because he never got to pursue his true intellectual passions? The same could be asked of Denise, never quite psychologically stable, and both siblings cope by resorting to tobacco and alcohol, rather than healthier methods. In the end, both watch the slow loss of their mother to dementia and their father to the pains of aging. It is a stark truth to witness these two, and then Francois, surrender to mortality.

This Strange Eventful History prompted sad musings about the importance of ancestral homeland, but I can’t say it left me hopeful for the future or aging. Keep that in mind when you pick it up.