In a 2021 New York Times essay, Jonathan Lee probed the resurgence of the historical novel untethered from conventions of genre – a vital and groundbreaking form, more than just a dutiful recreation of the past. As he observed: “Perhaps it has its roots in another phenomenon: The present has rarely felt as transitory as it does now.” Here Claire Messud plants her literary flag: Her beguiling, deftly crafted “This Strange Eventful History” vaults across seven decades, from World War II to the aughts, prismed through one family’s migrations through five continents as they forge a kind of nucleus, a centeredness, that they all may share.
As the Germans approach Paris, Gaston Cassar, a French naval attaché based in Greece, sends his wife and children to their native Algiers and then decamps to Beirut, striking an uneasy détente with de Gaulle’s resistance. His spouse, Lucienne, is his lighthouse during these stormy years; their love seems transcendent but conceals a disquieting secret. Their son, François, is smart and impetuous while his younger sister, Denise, is flighty, enamored of fancy dresses and fine meals.
Yet she commands the Cassars’ attention after they reunite in the wake of the war, the tail that wags the dog. “As a child she had been frail and skittish, her limbs like twigs, her pale blue eyes enormous,” Messud writes. “Strange that such apparent fragility should have amounted, really, to a determination of iron; but she had shaped the c.
