Over the years Claire Messud has become one of my favorite authors. I appreciate how she combines intriguing premises with beautiful writing. THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY is another great example. Here, Messud takes an epic family story and populates it with complex, fully-dimensional characters that are fascinating to read about. I didn't realize until after I'd finished that the Casser family was inspired by Messud's own family. The movement through time is done with such an expert hand that the reader is completely immersed and along for the ride.
Atmospheric and elegant, I highly recommend this one for fans of literary fiction.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy; all opinions in this review are completely my own.

I love this author and have read all her previous works. This book doesn't disappoint. It;'s wonderful! I love how tha author starts by saying you can jump into a story at any point and that's exactly what she does. She treats her reader as an intelligent human who can fill in the blanks. We get various perspectives over this epic family saga. I appreciate the Algerian- French story so much and hope to see it more. The characters are raw and real. Not all pretty but definitely relatable and as a reader I found myself rooting for all - both sides of the marriage, for example.
Thanks to W.W. Norton and Netgalley for the ARC.

A rock-solid five stars. This is an amazing story — or stories, really — an epic, a sweeping family drama covering several generations of the Cassar family, all of them destined to wander the globe for different reasons — from Algeria to Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki, Macedonia) to France, Australia, Switzerland, Toronto, and various U.S. locations. Though definitely fiction, the story is inspired by the author’s own family history.

This multilayered tale is rich with social and political history and culture (from 1940 to 2010), and it is held together by a network of human relationships that endure despite the odds. We cannot help but grasp the effects, both overt and subtle, of history on character, of actual events and of myths reverberating through the generations.

But what I found most amazing is the psychological richness, that is, Messud’s ability to plumb the depths of her characters’ inner lives, to articulate the complexities of warring impulses, desires, and regrets. I’ve always thought that poets are the ones we must depend on for this kind of subtlety and skill. But Messud is clearly a master. She details the lives of these unremarkable, quite “ordinary” characters with such precision and care that they are lifted from mundane to significant. And the novel to extraordinary. The writing throughout is spectacular.

In the Prologue, Messud (or perhaps her character Chloe; I couldn’t tell) says: “We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.”

It’s a very good idea to reread the Prologue after finishing the book! I read these words over and over as I pondered the beauty and depth of the novel I’d just read. And I thought about my own life, too, the connections, the past and the present flowing together, the hidden music. These are things I feel in my bones, but could never have stated so well, whether straightforwardly or through fiction. The book is a stunning accomplishment. Go into it expecting fullness, depth, paradox, mystery, revelation, and wisdom.

(I only wish the title were easier to remember!)

Many thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and to NetGalley for an advance reader copy of this marvelous book.

Not my favorite Messud. Fine writer she undoubtedly is, and here she works with incredible thoroughness to deliver psychologically rounded portraits of her many characters. And yet… The saga is shapeless, an almost desultory tracing of generation after generation, devotedly done but with no driving impulse other than the surprising fragmentation of this family. Yes, European history did this, to many. And each story has its fascination and intensity, its quirks and characters. Messud inhabits her fiction with the commitment of her own autobiographical fact. Understandable. But not, for me, quite enough.

It is very rare for me not to finish a book. In fact in the last three years, I've probably DNF'ed 2 books. And I've loved Messud's other novels. But this one was just not what I expected and even at the 40% mark I was still struggling to focus. At that point, I decided to call it and not continue with reading the book. I am confident there will be others who love it and her writing, as always, is beautiful but this was just not the right book for me. Since I didn't finish I will not rate it. Please read other reviews and I will absolutely look forward to and read Messud's next book.

with gratitude to W. W. Norton & Company and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This Strange Eventful History is “inspired by” the stories of author Claire Messud’s family (she stresses in an afterword that this is a work of fiction, but that “the Cassar family’s movements hew closely to those of my own family”), and initially, I thought that that would be fascinating: the novel begins with a mother fleeing with her children back to the Algeria of their birth at the dawn of WWII as her Navy officer husband watches France fall to the Nazis and awaits orders from his diplomatic posting in Greece. There was a nugget of something very interesting in that — a white family whose ancestors had been in Algeria for over a hundred years, and who thought of themselves as 100% belonging there and also 100% French citizens — and after the African country gained independence in 1962, these “pieds-noirs” had to make a home elsewhere in the world (along with the “harkis”: the reviled indigenous Algerians who had fought on the side of France in the war of independence), and this was a history I didn’t know and was eager to explore. But that’s not really what this novel is about. Instead, this reads like a domestic drama as we follow three generations of the Cassar family — from France to Australia, Argentina, and Canada — and delve into their educations and relationships and careers; flitting among a largish cast of characters in a book that ultimately felt too long. I was often bored, recognised that many long stories were probably included because they were based on real events (although with little literary or entertainment value), and when something startling did happen, I recognised it as one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” situations that probably shouldn’t be included in a novel. This might have worked better as a straight memoir — with plenty of Algerian history included — and while I can’t deny that Messud writes lovely sentences, this was, overall, just okay for me.

An epic tale, the story of the Cassar family, inspired by Messud's own family history. Moving through seven decades, mid-20th century through nearly the present day, and set in many places - Salonica, Algeria, Switzerland, Paris, Massachusetts, Toronto, Australia, and Connecticut - we meet the various Cassars, itinerant Algerians who are separated by WW II, and lose their homeland, alway in search of home, striving, faithful to each other and to their Catholicism, down through the generations, starting with Gaston and Lucienne, who marry and have a perfect idealized love, a love that has its own secret, the stories of their children, Francoise and Denise, and Francoise's marriage to Canadian Barbara, and their two daughters, Loulou, and Chloe, the single first-person narrator, and a writer. Intimate and expansive, their stories fold and unfold, secrets are gleaned and more. Atmospheric and immersive.

Thanks to W.W. Norton and Netgalley for the ARC.

I mean, it's a new Claire Messud -- of course it is going to be amazing. The novel traces the history of a family French settlers in Algeria, starting during World War Two and ending in the 2010s. The family moves around, becomes stateless, and fractures all over the globe, while remaining tightly bound. The elder child becomes a high powered CEO in a faltering marriage while the younger daughter never quite gains independence from her parents. The characters are richly drawn and the language is beautiful. An early contender for all the year end lists.

I have been to Algiers many times, so the book was kind of nostalgic for me. This is the second book I have read about the mid-20th century. It seems our fascination with the world in crisis in the first half of the 20th century is still too strong.

I found the narrative a little more complicated than a pleasurable read. For instance, children under 10 in the opening chapters sounded more like adults than kids. The novel talks about things that many have already written about, like the saving of Jews during the Second World War. The story moved slowly, and many characters lived in just a few pages.

The book can be compared with Amor Towles' novel, "A Gentleman in Moscow." But the art and craft of the two writers are much different, although they talk about the same era and its issues.