This Strange Eventful History: Claire Messud's Ambitious Novel Spanning Generations and Continents

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Excerpts from the interview:

Q: Since we are here really to discuss 'This Strange Eventful History', why don't you tell us what it is all about?
A: So the novel is about three generations of a family, and they are a French pied-noirs family. The pied-noirs were the French colonials in Algeria, and the novel spans 70 years, from 1940 to 2010. And the three generations are Gaston and Lucienne, who were born around the turn of the 20th century. Their children, Francois and Denise, who were born in the early 1930s, and then Francois and his wife Barbara's children, Chloe and Lulu, who were born in the 1960s. And it's a novel that has multiple points of view and that travels over not just a lot of time, but a certain amount of space, because the family, after the mid 1950s is in diaspora, travelling around, settling in different places around the world, and then moving on.

Q: It's good to evolve as a writer and challenge yourself as you did with this, did you not?A: Yes. The writer Peter Carey said to me at one point, this is 20 years ago, 'If it doesn't seem impossible, it's not worth doing'. And every time I write a book, I'm trying not to do the same thing that I did before, but to push myself in one way or another or multiple ways to try to evolve and develop. So, yes, this is my most ambitious novel, I would say.

Q: It is your grandfather's notes for you and your sister about the family, the family history and fictionalising it to a certain degree…A: My grandfather wanted to be a writer, and he actually, in his youth, wrote a novel and a book of stories that he didn't manage to publish. And in his retirement, he wrote a really rich document, which is a family memoir for my sister and me. It wasn't destined to be published. He wrote, it's very much addressed to us and it's about the family, it covers the years 1928, when my grandparents married, to 1946, which is the end of the war. And so the very first section, the part of the novel that's set in 1940, draws on that memoir. And then there are, in the course of the novel, memories or flashbacks to earlier times, some of which take information or details from that memoir, but mostly it's not from that memoir. I wish there were some way I could bring some of the amazing details from that memoir into the world that aren't there because it was so illuminating for me to read it. He wanted my sister and me to understand the world in which my grandparents had grown up, which is so far from the world in which we grew up. They were devout French Catholics living in a colony in Algeria, and we were secular American kids.

Q: What I found interesting was the variety of styles that you exhibit in this particular novel of yours, the richness of the kind of literary influences you have garnered over the years.A: My father used to say, 'culture is what's left when you've forgotten everything'. And I think there's some way in which we take things in. And I think of it as a sort of maceration that happens and things become unconscious and they just become part of us. And I think I can feel sometimes, because I've been teaching creative writing a long time, I can really tell who has been a reader since childhood and who has not. You know, those are things that you can't teach in a classroom. You learn them by reading and reading.

Q: Why is it so significant for you that history should be shared? There should be this continuum even maintained through literature.
A: I always feel the world around us has so much that I don't know, that I want to know about. And I think it's very possible to live without knowing and understanding. Part of my belief in that comes from the family that you're raised in. It was something that was impressed upon me by my father, who really wasn't. He wanted to see and learn and read and discover everything. He really was so keen just to understand. He travelled so many places and wanted to travel more places than he was ever able to. But he took us when we were children and we lived in Australia. And so part of his contract was round the world plane tickets for his family every year. So most of the travelling I've done in my life, I did before I was 10 years old. But I think that made me aware just of how big and complex and interesting the world is.

Q: This book is an example of when I hear people talk about how they struggle with the opening pages and I keep thinking, just wait, the beauty will hit you like a tsunami once you close this book.
A: You know, when you say that about people, I feel as though I wanted the book to be different sorts of books along the way. And I feel it starts out, in a way, as one sort of novel. It starts as a historical novel and that isn't, in the end, what it is. That's what I hope, anyway. I think of it in literary terms, modernism as the move from the 19th to the 20th century. I jokingly call it a move to the interior because that's what happened in literature. You know, the difference between a sort of Balzac or Dickens. And then moving on to Virginia Woolf, that's a move to the interior. But I also think, for me, in writing this novel, that part of what I was trying to do was the novel is also, over time, a move to the interior. In its way.