Book excerpt: “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud

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Claire Messud, author of the bestseller “The Emperor’s Children”, returns with “This strange eventful story” (WW Norton), a multigenerational story of family secrets that spans World War II to the 21st century.

Read an excerpt below.

“This Strange Hectic Story” by Claire Messud

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Prologue

I am a writer; I tell stories. Of course, I really want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save a life.

Seven years, said the clairvoyant, on that summer afternoon, it was a long time ago. Seven years in the Valley of Shadows. The sunlight streaming through the window behind his head turned his rusty curls into a golden halo. We sat across from each other at a card table in the front room of his colorful salt shaker, a mile from the waterfront in a New England vacation beach town. Like most of his customers, I was just passing through. Although I told her I was a writer, she insisted I was a healer; Once she said it, I wished it were true. Or: I realized that I always wanted it to be true, even though we are told that poetry doesn’t make anything happen. My desire, as old as humanity, to make words mean.

A seven-year journey in the shadow of Death: at the time of your prophecy, I was almost halfway through, if you count the family trip to my late grandparents’ house in Toulon, France, to celebrate my father’s seventy-fifth birthday – a work, as has been said, of colossal administration, a meeting that was also a collapse: my father in physical collapse, my mother, emaciated, in mental disarray, my aunt dancing in ever tighter circles around her bottle of whiskey, our children, still small and funny under the Mediterranean sun. But the count could have started earlier – from the moment my mother could no longer prepare a full meal; or the time, much earlier, when she could no longer keep up with the children’s birthdays; or, even before that, when she was unable, even for an hour, to take care of the children alone. … But if I start from the end and count backwards – the end being the last death, my aunt’s death, just after my mother’s, no death long after my father’s – then the Cape clairvoyant held my hand trembling in hers truly at the midpoint.

I am a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We are always in the middle; wherever we are, we only see partially. I also know that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past revolves with and within the present, and all time exists at the same time, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance – music happens, whether we describe it or not. A story is not a line; It’s something richer, that goes around and around, goes up and down, repeats itself.

And so this story – my family’s story – has many possible beginnings, or none at all: Mare Nostrum, Saint Augustine, Abd el-Kader, Charles de Gaulle, my grandparents, L’Arba, my father, my aunt, Zohra Drif, my mother, Albert Camus, Toronto, Cambridge, Toulon, Tlemcen, oh, Tlemcen: each and every one is part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial.

Or I could start with my birth, or with my father’s birth, or with his father’s birth, or with my mother’s or my grandmother’s birth. I could start with the secrets and the shame, the ineffable shame that, in telling their story, I wanted to finally heal. The shame of family history, of the history into which we were born. (How can I forget that after attending the birth of his first grandchild, my father, then elderly, tripped over the curb and fell into the street, a toppled mountain, and as he lay with the white fluff of his almost bald head in the mud of the gutter, he murmured not “Help me” but “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”?) I could start, of course, with loneliness.

Or I could start with the fact that the owner of our local pizzeria and our former neighbor is an Algerian man whose surname is also the name of the Algerian provincial town of his ancestors, the same town in which my pied-noir Her grandmother taught at a girls’ school in her youth, in the years before her marriage – years that were, in her case, numerous, because she only got married in her early thirties, the age at which women were considered unmarriageable. She may have even taught my neighbor’s grandmother or great-grandmother. Or I could start with the fact that dear Lebanese friends from my grandfather’s pre-war post in Beirut include the great-uncle of a dear friend of mine in this American life nearly a century later, whose daughter played with our son from the time in which they were round-limbed children. Or I could start with the angels on my father’s final journey to death, the witnesses of his many lives who appeared, sentinels and guides, along that final path, to guide him, the last homeless man, to his home. Eternal…

It doesn’t matter so much where this story begins as let it begin. And if, as I understand it, the story expands infinitely, rather than being a line or thread, then wherever I begin is just that…It’s not the beginning but a mere moment, a way of happening, a mouth…

Excerpted from “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud, published by WW Norton & Company. Copyright 2024 by Claire Messud. All rights reserved.

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“This Strange Hectic Story” by Claire Messud

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