This Strange Eventful History

This Strange Eventful History (2024) is a novel by American author Claire Messud. Loosely based on her own family’s history, it chronicles the experiences of the Cassars, a French Algerian family, as they’re displaced by World War II and the successful fight for Algerian independence. Various family members settle in France, Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the US, feeling out of place in each location and struggling to come to terms with the complexity of French Algerian identity after France’s colonial empire collapses. The novel explores themes related to displacement and belonging, the interplay between historical events and individual lives, and colonialism’s fraught legacy. The novel’s title derives from a key soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that, like the novel, examines individual identity within the broader contexts of lifespan and history.

Messud is known for character-driven narratives featuring multiple settings and strong female figures, and she often explores how identity and relationships evolve and how historical events impact individuals, families, and communities. Like This Strange Eventful History, Messud’s novel The Last Life (1999) tells the story of the pieds-noirs, an ethnically French community that lived in Algeria during its colonial occupation; it’s likewise a multigenerational saga focusing on a French Algerian family during the 20th century. Its setting moves seamlessly from Algeria to France to the UK and, like This Strange Eventful History, its characters grapple with an identity that is neither entirely French nor truly Algerian. Messud is also known for the novels The Emperor’s Children (2006), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Burning Girl (2017).

This guide refers to the 2024 hardcover edition by W. W. Norton and Company.

Content Warning: This guide discusses the source text’s depictions of addiction and attempted suicide.

Plot Summary

The novel begins in the early days of World War II. Its first narrator is François Cassar, a French Algerian boy raised in Greece, Lebanon, and Algeria by parents who were both born into the pieds-noirs community in Algiers. His father, Gaston, a naval officer, is stationed in Greece as the conflict begins to unfold. Fearing an Axis invasion, he’s forced to send his wife, Lucienne, and their children, François and Denise, back to Algeria. Gaston remains at his post in Salonica, struggling to fulfill his duties in the wake of Paris’s fall to Hitler’s advancing army. Gaston is far more worried about his family than he is about war, but he must still grapple with what it means to be French when France is occupied by the Nazis and what it means to be French Algerian during the stirrings of the nationalist Algerian fight for independence.

The entire Cassar family is displaced by both World War II and Algeria’s successful independence movement, and the novel follows Gaston and Lucienne as well as François and Denise as they attempt to forge new lives in various communities around the world. Just children when the war breaks out, François and Denise spend the duration of their childhood and adolescence in Algeria and France. François ultimately leaves to attend Amherst College in the US, and Denise remains in Algeria studying law until Algeria throws off French colonial rule and the pieds-noirs community is displaced. She resumes her studies in Paris, feeling stigmatized by the French for her Algerian roots. François, too, feels the sting of his complex identity. His classmates in the US don’t quite know what to make of him: Neither his French nor his American classmates consider him truly French, but they don’t think of him as Algerian either.

When François and Denise are older, they move abroad. François meets and marries a Canadian woman named Barbara whose family doesn’t approve of him because he’s foreign and, they suspect (though inaccurately), isn’t entirely white. François and Barbara continue the Cassar family’s nomadic trajectory, living in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia at various times. They have two children, girls named Chloe and Loulou, and Barbara struggles with the constraints of motherhood. François is forced to give up his graduate studies in favor of a business career, and Barbara flounders until finally finding her place in law school. Denise likewise calls multiple locales home: She settles in France, Argentina, and then back in France, all the while struggling with identity confusion and difficult mental health conditions.

Gaston and Lucienne are forced to flee Algeria upon Algerian independence, and they live for a time in Argentina’s French community before returning to the Mediterranean to settle in Toulon, in the south of France. Gaston works at several large firms engaged in international business and watches firsthand as the world begins to rebuild and recalibrate in the decades following World War II. Lucienne struggles with debilitating migraines but remains dedicated to her duties as wife, mother, and household manager. The two try their best to retain ties to both French and French Algerian culture, preserving French traditions and remaining devoutly Catholic throughout the rest of their lives.

François and Barbara eventually settle in Connecticut. François spends several years working in New York City and commuting home, and during this time, the family’s relationships begin to fray. François is increasingly unhappy with his life choices: He feels that he’s unsuited to the world of business and laments his decision to leave academia in order to better support his family. He doesn’t think his wife or children fully realize the sacrifice he made for them and is often short-tempered. Barbara and the girls begin to resent his anger, and François copes with the stress by self-medicating with alcohol. Eventually, Lucienne dies, and Denise lives in Toulon with her father, Gaston. She maintains a close relationship with her nieces, Chloe in particular. Chloe comes of age, decides to become a writer, and marries.

The entire family gathers in Toulon when Gaston’s health begins to decline. After his death, Denise stays on in his apartment, and the rest of the family returns to their various homes. As François and Barbara age, François’s health declines as a result of both his drinking and a protracted battle with cancer. Barbara experiences neurological decline, and her husband and children struggle to cope with her dementia. François eventually succumbs to his ailment, and Denise travels from Toulon to the US to see him one last time. After his death, she feels a distinct sense of loss but resumes her life in Toulon. She remains deeply bonded with Chloe, who is now grown and has children of her own. The novel’s Epilogue returns to Gaston and Lucienne’s courtship, revealing that Lucienne was Gaston’s aunt. The two always felt as though their relationship was preordained by God, but to their family, it was a great source of shame. They married despite the objections of their parents and relatives, and the true nature of their relationship was hidden and never spoken of again.