Laura Miller in Slate:
“I’m a writer; I tell stories,” reads the first line of Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, a novel based on her own family’s past. Admittedly, that’s not the most promising opener, since everyone from ad executives to life coaches goes around calling themself a “storyteller” these days. “Of course, really,” Messud’s narrator continues, “I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.”
That’s more like it. That’s a meaningful assertion of this novel’s purpose: to preserve and cherish the beauty and sorrow of a way of life since passed from this earth and in danger of being lost to memory. This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.
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