WW Norton
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Claire Messud, the best-selling author of “The Emperor's Children,” returns with “This Strange Story of Events” (WW Norton), a multi-generational story of family secrets spanning World War II into the 21st century.
Read an excerpt below.
“This Strange Story of Events” by Claire Messud
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Prologue
I am a writer; I tell stories. Of course, really, I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.
Seven years, said the clairvoyant, that summer afternoon is a long time ago. Seven years in the Shadow Valley. The sunlight through the window behind her head transformed her rusty curls into a golden nimbus. We sat across from each other at a card table in the front room of his salt house, a mile from the boardwalk in a New England seaside vacation town. Like most of their customers, I was passing through. Although I told her I was a writer, she insisted that I was a healer; once he said it, I wanted it to be true. Or: I realized that I had always wanted it to be true, even though we are told that poetry does nothing. My desire, as old as humanity, to make words mean.
Seven Year Journey in the Shadow of Death: At the time of his prophecy, I was almost halfway through a family trip to my late grandparents' home in Toulon, France, to celebrate my father's seventy-fifth birthday , a work, as it was said, of a colossal administration, a gathering that was also a discovery: my father in physical collapse, my mother, emaciated, in mental disorder, my aunt dancing in circles every time tighter around his whiskey bottle, our children, still small, ancient in the Mediterranean sun. But the countdown could have started earlier—from the moment my mother could no longer prepare a full meal; or the time, long before, when I could no longer keep track of children's birthdays; or, earlier still, when he could not, not even for an hour, manage the children themselves. … But if I begin at the end and count backwards—the end is the last death, my aunt's death, quick on my mother's heels, nor the death long after my father's—then the clairvoyant del Cap took my trembling hand in his. really in the middle.
I am a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It really doesn't matter where you 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 move together in harmony and disharmony. The past revolves with and within the present, and all time exists simultaneously, all around us. Ebb and flow, harmonies and dissonance: music happens, whether we describe it or not. A story is not a line; it is something richer, one that spins and swirls, rises and falls, repeats itself.
And so this story – the story of my family – has many possible beginnings, or none: 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 a part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial.
Or I could start with my birth, or my father's birth or his father's birth, or my mother's or grandmother's. He could start with the secrets and the shame, the ineffable shame that telling his story would finally cure. The shame of family history, of the history we were born into. (How can we forget that after attending the birth of his first grandchild, my father, then grown, tripped over the curb and fell into the street, a tumbled mountain, and as he lay with the white plume on his head almost bald to the gutter mud muttered not “Help me” but “I'm sorry, sorry, sorry”?) It could start, of course, with loneliness.
Or I could start with the fact that the owner of our local pizzeria and our former next-door neighbor is an Algerian man whose last name is also the name of the Algerian provincial town of his ancestors, the same town where my pied-noir the grandmother taught at the girls' school in her youth, in the years before she married, years which, in her case, were many, for she did not marry until she was thirty, an age when the women were considered unmarriageable. I might even have taught my neighbor's grandmother or great-grandmother. Or I could start with the fact that dear Lebanese friends from my grandfather's prewar posting to Beirut include the great uncle of a dear friend of mine in this American life almost a century later, whose daughter played with our son since they were small children with round limbs. Or I might begin with the angels on my father's last journey to death, the witnesses of his many lives who appeared, sentinels and guides, along this final path, to guide him, the homeless, to the his eternal home…
It doesn't matter so much where this story begins that begins. And if, as I have come to understand, the story is expanding infinitely, rather than a line or thread, then wherever it begins is just that…not the beginning but just a moment a way of passing, a mouth…
From “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud, published by WW Norton & Company. Copyright 2024 by Claire Messid. All rights reserved.
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