This Strange Eventful History

(Paperback)

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Description

'One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller' Yiyun Li

June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.

A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.

Reviews

A tour de force, This Strange Eventful History is one of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters. Call it the War and Peace of the 20th and 21st century, call it The Long View of a family migrating through many borders, worlds, and eras, call it anything and we fall short. Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller, and the novel, an all-encompassing history of many human hearts and any human heart, will linger and haunt us as the best and the most heartbreaking memory * Yiyun Li *
A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become "colonized" by family -- Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winner of THE NETANYAHUS
What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours - of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludes us, how time -implacable and indecipherable - befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know -- Paul Harding
This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment - rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family - and we suspect as we read it, her own - is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite. -- Ayad Akhtar

Author Bio

Claire Messud is the author of numerous award-winning and revered novels including most recently The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.