This Strange Eventful History

‘I’d known for a long time – decades – that I wanted to explore the history of my father’s family, French colonials from Algeria who, in diaspora (both before and after Algerian independence), lived in many places. I was also interested by the repeated intersections of their small lives with the greater forces of history in the second half of the 20^th century – World War Two, of course, but also the Algerian War, the rise of the oil trade, the rise of global capitalism and corporate extraction of resources in developing countries, the increasing dominance of the English language, the beginnings of global warming, the fall of Communism…  

As for why now, at this point the question for me was  ‘if not now, then when?’; but also I became aware, with the US election and Brexit in 2016, that the worldview with which I had grown up – a vision, with an eye still on the horrors of WW2, that valued hybridity, internationalism, the ending of borders in favour of cooperation – had been superseded by something else entirely, a dark return to tribal identities, authoritarianism and walls. My French grandfather wrote, in the 1970s, a personal memoir for my sister and me, covering the years 1928 to 1946 – he called it Everything We Believed In, because he wanted us to understand our grandparents’ world. I realised that for anyone going forward to understand worldviews that have vanished, we need to tell the stories.’

Read the full interview here.

‘The novel opens in June 1940 when Paris falls to the Germans, a moment that, like many important historical events, casts a centrifugal force on people’s lives. The compelling narrative follows three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world, from Algeria to the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and France. Epic in its scale, while intimately rooted in each character’s internal landscape, the novel reminds us how literature can be expansive and timeless.’

Maureen Corrigan, NPR

‘A cosmopolitan, multigenerational story that, paradoxically, sticks close to home … The novel certainly has the stately sweep and weight of a magnum opus, but I don’t think Messud is simply praising her own accomplishment. As I’ve said, this is a novel about displacement, both political and personal. And, you have to have lived a while to write, as Messud does here, with such intimate melancholy about how time messes with us all, displacing us from earlier versions of ourselves.’

Julia M. Klein, The Los Angeles Times

‘Lyrically written and almost immediately absorbing. As we come to know its characters, it packs a surprising emotional punch, all the more so because of its ambiguous relationship to reality […] Against the backdrop of world-historical upheavals, Messud recounts a bittersweet story of passionate love, frustrated ambitions, emotional dysfunction and, ultimately, survival.’

Ann Levin, Associated Press

‘For fans of Messud, whose earlier novels include the bestselling 2006 novel “The Emperor’s Children” as well as “The Woman Upstairs,” this latest work will be ambrosial, brimming with long passages that attempt to capture the evanescent sensations of life — touch, taste, sounds, smells, the ever-shifting register of light. Others may get lost in dense, descriptive passages that roll on and on, owing a debt to the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf, one of Messud’s literary heroes. Yet all in all, the book is a masterful achievement, a somber, joyous meditation on the consolations and disappointments of empire, nation, faith and family.’

Alden Mudge, BookPage

‘With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her descriptions of people and places are beautiful, precise and illuminating. Her understanding of the human soul is profound. This is reason enough to read the novel.’

Emma Alpern, Vulture

‘And though Messud does seem to appear, as “Chloe,” in her new book, it is far from the airy world of autofiction. Rather than that genre’s sidelong irony and everyday language, which lets you slip in and out as though checking on a text chain, it is earnest, rigorous, and indebted to modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; you could call it a professor’s novel (she teaches at Harvard).’