Claire Messud interview: ‘I wanted to explore the history of my father’s family’

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

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the horrors of WW2, that valued hybridity, internationalism, the ending of borders in favour of cooperation – had been superseded by something else entirely, a dark return to tribal identities, authoritarianism and walls.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. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

All my life I’ve loved reading – I was the kid who just wanted to lie on the sofa and read a book. I loved all of E. Nesbit, and Swallows and Amazons, Harriet the Spy, Watership Down, The Wizard of Earthsea – as well as some perhaps less well-known books that became part of my imagination for life – Elizabeth Goodge’s Henrietta’s House, Eric Linklater’s The Wind on the Moon, John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, Ivan Southall’s Ash Road… I could go on… 

The book that made me want to become a writer  

As soon as I realised that stories weren’t like rocks and trees, that people made them up, I knew I wanted to do that with my life. So there’s no single book that made me think ‘this is what I want to do’. But I remember reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in high school – the exhilaration of discovering that you could write about any human experience, about characters who were messy, mad, even loathsome – that the aim is to capture all of what it’s like to be alive. That made fiction, which I already loved so much, seem still more exciting. I still feel that way about Notes from Underground – I teach creative writing, and love that Dostoevsky would likely be pilloried in workshop today, bombarded with advice about how to ameliorate and standardise his narrative… but the novella’s deep strangeness (of form as well as content) is what makes it so powerful.  

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

The works of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald both had that effect on me, now many years ago – as they did on many others – but to choose a single more recent book, I’d say Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which is exhilaratingly ambitious in so many ways – urgent, compelling and politically engaged; formally inventive; intellectually rich; narratively free. Luiselli’s fearlessness is inspiring.  

The book that comes closest to perfection

There are radically different versions of perfect – for me, War and Peace, Mrs. Dalloway and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower are all perfect – but each is differently perfect. When a book fully inhabits the world it sets out (whether that’s the family life of Friedrich von Hardenberg in late 18th century Germany or inside Clarissa Dalloway’s head or the broader canvas of early 19th century Russia) and makes it fully vivid and present to the reader in as precise, succinct and yet complete a way as possible, that’s a form of perfection. For me, two different contemporary versions of perfection would be Damon Galgut’s The Promise (which won the Booker Prize in 2021) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (2010), translated by Susan Bernofsky.  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’m reading Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, and am in awe. I’m not sure ‘like’ is quite the right word – it’s much bigger than that – stylistically, narratively, thematically. Everyone should read this novel.  

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

There are so many wonderful books on the Booker shortlists and longlists that it’s impossible, really, to pick one – but I’ll vote for Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which was shortlisted in 1996. It’s a remarkable novel, following four main characters in an unnamed city during the Emergency of the mid-1970s. I can’t quite believe it’s not more widely known today – he’s a brilliant writer.