This is my second book by Claire Messud and it is chock full of bits I want to remember. Essentially it is a fictionalized multi-generational family history, made more interesting by the world events that moved family members around the globe. First we have Gaston and his wife Lucienne, French people who lived in Algeria (pieds-noirs) who were displaced in 1940 by the war, Gaston to Salonica, Greece, Lucienne and the children to a small town in Algeria Over the generations, family members lived in Beirut, Morocco, Buenos Aires, Geneva, Toulon, France (near Marseille), Paris, Sydney, Australia, Connecticut. What marks this as a family history is hard to tease out. The purpose seemed to be to reveal and document these people that the author had strong feelings for rather than to create a fictional world.
Notable moments to remember in this book:
An interlude of the time of François, the son of Gaston and Lucienne, at Harvard in 1953, following the years of deprivation due to the war and his brutal time in a boarding school in Paris. He and two fraternity brothers had a road trip to Key West. He was alien to the two French fraternity brothers, but to the Americans he was “completely indecipherable.”
Ten years later Gaston, Lucienne, and their grown daughter Denise lived in Buenos Aires. Denise worked in a bookshop and was in thrall to its owner, Fräulein Lebach. In this section Denise meets Borges and chats with him about “a novel by an Indian chap from Trinidad called A House for Mr. Biswas,” a memorable book for me. Also mentioned was Gurdjieff, described as “an imposingly mustachioed Russia-Armenian guru.” A decade later, I found that if I read a bit of his work before I fell asleep, I had lively dreams and peaceful sleep.
My favorite moment occurred when François and his wife Barbara lived in Sydney with their two young children. The younger one, Chloe, a 7-year old, tells about her Canadian grandmother’s visit. She says, “She’s the only person guaranteed to stick up for me and that is why I told her about my jumper, which she calls my sweater.” She goes on to tell that she had taken her jumper to school in her book bag and had stuffed her uneaten banana there too. It was there forgotten for months, and “I could tell that the banana, now blackened, and the jumper, once gray, had got mixed up, now a single item with a strong sweet banana odor. And then the odor faded and the jumper, in a newly glued shape that I did not dare take out of the bag, became stiff, like cardboard in some parts.” She did nothing about it until she could ask her grandmother for help.
François’ articulation of his hopes of escaping the limitations imposed by French societal structures is memorable:
He, François, wanted to free the family from the modesty and genteel poverty of their past, and in this time of change and new alliances, of the upheaval of old class structures and lives of limited expectations, when value was to be determined by the circumstances of one’s birth or the power of one’s connections but by the ferocity of one’s intelligence and one’s will, by one’s commitment to hard work and ingenuity, why shouldn’t he be capable of anything?
There were long sections about the slow agonizing deaths of elders: Barbara’s father, François’ father Gaston, and finally François. Those seemed to be a documenting of the lives of loved ones, rather than fiction.
Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History, W.W. Norton and Co., 2024, 428 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.