This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

This book was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2024, and as is so often the case, I liked this book better than the one that won. A review that I read of this book noted that the author has taken her structure as well as her title from a speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where Jaques declared that the “strange eventful history” of human life has seven acts--the title of the book is taken from this, as well as the structure of the book--although it is a drama rather than a comedy. The book is a sweeping story of the lives of three generations of the Cassars, a Franco-Algerian family at a pivotal time in history for Algeria. It begins in 1940 in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), as the Germans sweep into France and Gaston Cassar hears General de Gaulle make his broadcast calling on those French still “free” to join him. She ends 70 years later, in 2010, in Connecticut, as Gaston’s son dies in a hospice, tended by a Haitian nurse whose name, like his, alludes to a language and nationality foisted on them by colonial history--the French colonialization legacy is part of the subtext of this story. It includes the Algerian war of independence, as a result of which the family lose their home and national identity; the two years the family’s most promising scion spends as a student in Paris, during which he endures something that blights his adult life; his sister’s broken-hearted suicide attempt; an alcoholic’s hard-won recovery; the courtship of a couple who have been held up throughout the novel as exemplars of married love and yet all is not as it seems. If you like these lengthy stories that cover intergenerational trauma, this is a book for you.