This Strange Eventful History

Lucienne and Gaston “believe as much in their country as in their love.” Their country is Algeria, which at the time (the late '20s) was also France; their love is mismatched by age and circumstance, but true. Their story, and those of the generations that follow, traces how both beliefs fall apart and hold together over time. It’s Claire Messud’s own family story, told as fiction in decade-by-decade snapshots from 1940 to 2010. Because of that episodic form, and perhaps because its truth makes it less malleable to a novelist’s plotting, it gathers slowly but accumulates toward a powerful sense of connection and melancholy as the family, pushed by ambition, affection, and the forces of history, disperses across the globe, to Greece, Australia, Canada, France, Connecticut, while never quite losing the sense of a lost home, in a country they can’t return to.