Witnessing history with Claire Messud

Is there anything more alluring on a long empty afternoon than a pile of unread books? All those brand-new hardbacks with colorful jackets, full of promise and potential surprises--but where to begin?

I picked from the top of the pile This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, a novel based loosely on the author's family history ranging from 1927 to the present and from Algiers to France, England, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Connecticut, and elsewhere, each time and place evoked through a wealth of vivid details to make these disparate times and places feel rich and real.

The plot follows members of an extended family as they try to create meaningful lives in the midst of constraints imposed by both large historical events (World War II, Algerian independence, the Cold War) and smaller but equally impactful family dynamics and responsibilities. As Hitler's forces conquer France, a French Algerian naval officer struggles to decide whether to join the resistance or stay home and protect his family; instead of staging an abstract conflict between love and war, Messud makes concrete the forces that pull the character in each direction, illustrating how life-changing decisions may be influenced by an accumulation of seemingly insignificant details.

Past and present interconnect and echo. The opening chapter features a young boy carrying his younger sister on his back to protect her tiny feet on a long dusty trek; years later, the younger sister tries to carry her brother's burdens and protect his fragile ego from the forces that tear him down. This urge to protect others leads family members to hide secrets and troubling emotions, so that gestures inspired by love lead to betrayal and alienation.

Despite frequent visitations of suffering, despair, and death, the novel is suffused with hope, particularly in certain quiet moments when characters consider how they are connected to others across time and space. In 1989, Chloe is making the ferry crossing from Calais to Dover, thinking about the family members she's left behind and wondering about the boat's other passengers, the boyfriend who will later become her husband and the strangers she will bump elbows with but never truly know. Trapped in transit between those she loves and those she will never know, she wonders, "How turbulent might the crossing prove? Each of us carried to the shore by all that had come before, then launched upon the wide, dark ocean."

This, in a nutshell, describes the arc of the novel, but Chloe isn't done. She gives herself a mission: "Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can't choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can't know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain."

Another character--Chloe's aging aunt Denise--echoes these words in a later chapter. Like Chloe, Denise inhabits a liminal space, the last of her family members living in France while her beloved brother lies on his deathbed in America, and she muses on the missed opportunities in a life that others consider wasted. How can she measure the impact of a life devoted to protecting others, even if that protection is ultimately futile? Distant from her brother, she draws close to him in memory:

In her mind, she could see him, not as he was now but in all his ages. If nothing else, on this planet, they had borne loving witness to each other's lives, to the days and journeys, the freight of emotions, to the blossoming and dwindling of their animal selves. Much sorrow and rage, but more than that, laughter, joy, and wonder. How, now, as the shadows had grown so long, to cleave to the light? To be a witness, to stand alongside, simply to have lived through these strange, beautiful, appalling times, to have been a night-light, a mirror, a support--that, too, was God's work, though the ambitious American nieces, faithless and perhaps soulless might disdain it. That wasn't nothing.

This strange eventful history that made a life. 

And this is what Messud accomplishes in This Strange Eventful History: transcending time and space to bear witness to the small and insignificant events that build a life. How, now, to cleave to the light? Start by reading Claire Messud. 

Big ol' pile o' Christmas books (and that's not all!)