Review: Vivien Horler

This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud (Fleet)

South Africans know all about diasporas. So many people have come here, seeking a better or less unstable life: Eastern European Jews in the early 20^th century, Britons after World War 2 (of which I’m one), later as the wind of change blew across Africa, white Kenyans and Northern and Southern Rhodesians, Mozambicans and Angolans.

Then South Africans started to leave, to Britain and the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, mainly white, but joined today by an increasing number of black South Africans, forming a diaspora of their own. And now we have new diasporas here, Somalis, Rwandans, Congolese, Malawians, Zimbabweans…

People will always move, and trying to stop them is like bailing out a boat with a colander.

Sometimes they find better lives, sometimes not, but however successful the move, there is always heartbreak, always a longing for people, country, food and a sense of belonging.

There is another diaspora I’d never given a thought to, that of the pied noirs, white French-speaking Algerians. I had to look the word up when I started reading Eventful History, as it is a saga about a family of pied noirs, who left the country where they had lived for generations when Algeria became independent from France in 1962.

Author Claire Messud says in a note that the novel, although a work of fiction, was inspired by three generations of her family’s story. It is partly based on a history her grandfather wrote for her and her sister, and on family stories and letters.

It opens as Germany marches into Paris in 1940, with Francois, aged about 10, writing a letter to Papa in Salonika, where he is the naval attache at the French consulate. Francois, his mother and baby sister Denise, are staying with elderly aunts in Algeria, where they have been hustled as the Italians enter the war.

Papa and Maman call Algeria home and say Algiers the most beautiful city on earth, with “its shining white buildings rising in a crescent around the glittering Mediterranean”, but for Francois, who has lived all his life as a diplomat’s child in Greece and Lebanon and is now sharing a dusty, cluttered apartment with several elderly aunts, it feels anything but.

Meanwhile Gaston, in Salonika, is desperate to know whether his family have made it safely to Algeria – the post is no longer working – is lonely without his beloved wife Lucienne who grounds him, wonders whether he should heed De Gaulle’s call for Frenchmen to go to Britain and fight for France from there – but how can he as a serving French naval officer? Everything and everyone is on edge and no one knows what will happen.

Much later, after the war, Francois, who completes his education in Algeria after a brief, disastrous attempt at college in Paris, wins a Fulbright to Harvard and falls in love with the United States. Despite being looked down on by some of his frat brothers, Francois is happy.

He eventually meets and marries a Canadian, Barbara, but his marriage is never as devoted or as happy as that of his parents. As for the Protestant Barbara, she deeply resents having to be the charming daughter-in-law when Gaston and Lucienne come to stay from France, all formality, three-course meals, starched linen napkins and mass.

We follow the generations of the family, the departure from Algeria upon independence for Toulon in France, their stints in Buenos Aires and Canada and the US and Australia.

We hear the conversations between the generations, such as when American granddaughter Chloe challenges her grandfather about colonialism and asks what the French thought they were doing in Algeria.

And the old man responds, mildly, that the US and Australia, where Chloe has cheerfully lived, “are simply more successful examples of settler colonialism –  no less unjust, no less brutal, simply with a fuller obliteration of the native cultures”. Ouch!

Gaston and Lucienne get old and die, and so eventually do Francois and Barbara, and now the story is taken up by Chloe – clearly based on Claire Messud herself – and her sister, who are thoroughly modern Americans.

We hear this story in the different voices of the protagonists, Gaston, Francois, his sister Denise, Barbara, and Chloe, and we care about them, because Messud has written real people who are hopeful and loving and disappointed and lost.

In her prologue Messud, who has six other novels to her credit as well as a book of autobiographical essays (which I’d like very much to read), says it was hard to tell where to begin with this story about her family, “as we’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially”.

But she adds, it doesn’t really matter, as “the past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us… A story is not a line; it is a rich thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself”.

I enjoyed this book very much.

• This Strange Eventful History is one of Exclusive Boks’s top reads for July.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

s Strange Eventful History is one ofExclusive Books’s top reads for July,