“This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or
bad – rather both good and bad – but that was not the point. Above all, they
had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that
could deny, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn,
to know.”
I had such high hopes for book six on my Booker journey. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful
History (W.W. Norton & Company 2024), a family saga that spans from
1927 Algeria to 2010 Connecticut, was predicted to be pretty high on my list of
longlist favorites. And it’s proving to be my biggest disappointment.
The theme for this year seems to be very pretty writing and
not a lot of meat. And surprisingly in
this novel that was inspired by Messud’s own family, there isn’t much heart. This
is a difficult review because I should have loved this, but I didn’t and it hurts
my feelings a little bit.
So why didn’t I like it?
The snapshots we get that rotate through various family members are too
brief a vignette to create any attachment. In fact, they frequently showcase characteristics
that make these family members unlikeable. The best and what I thought was the most
promising was the opening in Algeria in 1940 with eight-year-old Francois
writing a letter to his father, a French naval attaché, as the Germans took
France. This brief section sets the scene for Francois, his younger sister, Denise,
and his parents, Gaston and Lucienne. And then we frog hop 13 years to Francois
studying in Massachusetts. It’s a bit of whiplash and a great disappointment. Where are the missing years? I want the missing pages! And we get a bit of
him in college, of visiting Cuba, then FLASH, we’re moving on and the reader is
left holding a snapshot and wanting the rest.
In addition to the jarring reading experience, the
characters are so unlikeable – in particular, Barbara, Francois’s wife, who has
to get dementia to be nice. And then she’s
only nice to her dying husband because she doesn’t know who he is. The telling
scene for me is when they were newly weds and he calls her and tells her how
much he loves her and he just wants her to say it back – she won’t. Just like over the decades, he wants her to
take his hand, but she doesn’t. He’s no
prize either as an adult, but she is just distasteful to him, his parents, and
his sister. This love/hate she has for his family isn’t fully explored. But then again, nothing is explored.
Identity and the disconnect of being Algerian and French and
not seemingly fitting in anywhere is a heavy theme through the novel, in
particular Francois’s sections (and his father’s), but with this storytelling technique,
it never gets a lot flesh.
Meh.
Booker Count: 6 of 13.
A Girl Named Tommi 