Borrowed Time

In December 1998, Chloe wanders through her aunt’s apartment in Toulon, France. She has only a few hours to herself before her father’s sister comes out of surgery. The small flat — which once belonged to the thirty-two-year-old writer’s paternal grandparents — has been the only constant familial home she’s known. It served as an immovable point, complete with its immovable characters (Grand’-mère, Grand-père, Tante Denise), during years of geographic upheaval that saw her, her sister, and her parents bounce between Switzerland, Australia, the United States, France, and Canada. Now its emptiness — both of her grandparents died in the past few years — strikes her. She notices the stillness of the objects surrounding her:

At every turn, Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History seems to ask, What was this place? Spanning four generations of the Cassars as they spread across four continents, the novel questions the materials of life and love, as well as the strange settings in which they take root and grow. In Messud’s fictional world, the architecture of building a family is bound to be shoddy, full of imperfections and loose parts. Characters look back on their lives, and the lives of their parents, with critical but yearning eyes. She writes into this space — poised between personal reflection and shared history, between shame and respect — and produces an arresting account of the way intergenerational love gets lost in translation.

Structured in six parts along with a prologue, an interlude, and an afterword, the book, which was longlisted for this year’s Giller Prize, is a dense reflection of the complexity of family spaces, particularly in a century of rewritten borders. Each part is set in a different decade, from the 1940s through to 2010, with chapters that pivot between months, characters, and far-flung places. Together these disjointed and at times disorienting scenes (one closely follows the consciousness of a character with Lewy body dementia) make up a magnificent whole. Alongside the characters, the reader experiences the futility of trying to understand how time, as it unfolds, impacts our relationships with one another.

The novel begins in June 1940, with Chloe’s father, François Cassar, living in a small Algerian town as a young boy. The nine-year-old writes a letter to his own father, Gaston, a French naval officer. “The Germans have crossed the gates of Paris,” he prints carefully. He knows the importance of the distant capital even though he’s never set foot in France, having spent his childhood thus far between Salonica and Beirut. He doesn’t love Algeria as his parents do. In fact, “he couldn’t see a single good thing about it.” Tired of passing afternoons with his younger sister, Denise, as his sole companion, he misses Greece and Lebanon and senses that even his mother is only pretending to be happy in this place, “where his family belonged, and where they had been from for a hundred years.” This tension that François picks up — the ever-diminishing idea that French colonizers belonged to or could be at home in Algeria, that “Algeria was France”— provides the ideological backdrop for the Cassars over the next seventy years.

In the late 1950s, while François heads to the United States to study, we watch his parents reunite and then relocate, first to Morocco and then, as political unrest mounts in Algeria, to Buenos Aires: “They seemed calmly to accept that the world and the life they’d known was finished forever.” After a summer alone in France and a failed suicide attempt, Denise joins her parents in Argentina. She begins playing golf with other French women her age, works at a bookshop frequented by European expats (until her boss suggests that she’s queer), and pursues a short-lived stint as a travel agent. Her time in South America represents an alternative to the “darker, damper, lonelier, more grueling” life she might lead in Paris. “Not that nothing mattered, in Buenos Aires,” she thinks, “but that things mattered slightly less, or differently.” Denise’s repressed and passive nature leaves her without companionship or a career. “Her illness had exempted her from these requirements of adulthood,” she thinks, and ushered her into a life of sacrifice and caretaking.

Later we find François living in Geneva with his Canadian wife, Barbara. There they endure an era of growing resentment in their early marriage that sets the tone for years to come. Barbara’s frequent trips home to Toronto bother François, who fears the idea of them leaving behind Europe and diminishing his already fraught connection to France. Barbara similarly feels nervous about her departure from North American life, and her unease slowly transforms into disappointment. The romantic foundation of their union steadily breaks down in Switzerland; by the time they decide to relocate to Australia, their relationship is distant and strained. In them — in their early love and then their quiet, lifelong angst — Messud poses unanswerable questions about privilege and love. We see how the shared romance of worldliness can slowly fade into an unhappy compromise of culture and, ultimately, an inarticulable loss of self.

These anxieties are passed on to Chloe, one of Barbara and François’s two daughters, whom we meet in Sydney, in the early 1970s. The seven-year-old girl — the only first-person narrator of the book — struggles with what seem to be obsessive thoughts and fears. Unbeknownst to her parents, she sleeps outside to protect them from burglary. In a poignant scene, she prays while she, along with her sister, father, and maternal grandmother, must drive across a flooded road during a storm. She blames herself for the situation. “I was the night watchman, but I hadn’t properly kept watch,” Chloe says. “I had allowed myself to fall asleep, as if we would be safe, and we were not.” Her worrisome behaviour as a child leads her to become a writer; her juvenile prayers to prevent accidents are replaced by the literary impulse to do justice to a life. The narrator of the prologue — who could be the author as easily as it could be Chloe — begins, “I’m a writer; I tell stories. Of course, really, I want to save lives.”

The tone of the novel shifts as we see both generations of Cassar patriarchs die in the span of a few chapters. In 1998, François wakes in Toulon on the morning of Gaston’s funeral. He feels old and tired, and as he readies for the day, his mind wanders. He thinks of his father’s willpower, his own alcoholism, and their shared failures. “He’d been buffeted by History,” the narrator explains, “every bit as much as his son.” Like Gaston, François had prioritized providing for his wife and children over anything creative after abandoning his doctoral studies. But unlike his father, he never quietly fuelled his emotional and intellectual self (Gaston handwrites as much of his life story as he can before he dies). On that grief-filled day, François is left feeling unmoored: “He sometimes felt that getting older was like inhabiting a mansion you couldn’t afford, so that you were forced to shut down one room after another, eventually entire wings, until you huddled in the kitchen, breaking up the furniture for firewood. How to catalog all that had been lost?”

Chloe seems to be the answer. She represents a major departure from her patrilineal forebears by refusing to accept France’s colonial past, risking her wealth to pursue a creative career, and attempting to recover, in writing, some of what has been lost. And in 2010, we find her navigating the death of François. Chloe goes to visit him in hospital with her mother; after they step out to get lunch, she discovers that he has died in their brief absence. Hours later, at her daughter’s birthday party in a packed restaurant —“the air filled with eager human noise”— she confronts the fact that life, quite simply, goes on. “Alive,” she recalls, “everything around us was alive.”

In vivid, careful prose, Messud reveals that one person’s history is world history. However claustrophobic and myopic it feels, the family unit might be the only lens through which we can begin to understand — or perhaps just glimpse — a larger reality. And to strive toward a more complete picture of where we come from is the only way to stave off the loneliness that befalls almost every character.

Rarely does a novel feel as singular and complete as This Strange Eventful History. It is a profound expression of what it feels like to walk, alone, through the darkest parts of the past.