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Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. The latest novel from acclaimed writer Claire Messud is drawn from her family's history and her grandfather's own memoir. It's titled This Strange Eventful History. The novel is a decades-spanning drama that follows the Cassars, a family of French descent from colonial Algeria who find themselves spread across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. There's Patriarch Gaston who is stationed in Greece when the Germans take Paris. He sends his beloved wife, Lucianne, their son François, and daughter Denise, back to Algeria to be safe from the violence that's to come. As the decades pass, the Cassars spread across the globe, and François builds a family of his own. Eventually, a granddaughter named Chloe becomes interested in her family's complex relationship with French colonialism and with a shocking secret at the foundation of this family tree.

In a starred review, Kirkus says the novel is brilliant and heart-retching. Messud is one of contemporary literature's best. Wow. Claire Messud will be speaking tonight at 7:00 at the Center for Fiction with Jennifer Egan, but first, I am so delighted to have her with me in studio. Claire, welcome to the show.

Claire Messud: Thank you so much, Kousha. It's wonderful to be here.

Kousha Navidar: It's wonderful to have you. When did you know you really wanted to dive into your family's history with this novel?

Claire Messud: It's a funny question. I could answer it by saying, "Oh, 20 years ago, or, oh, 10 years ago, or, oh, 5 years ago," because there were different moments along the way, but all of those are true. I think my grandfather wrote this memoir for my sister and me, and it covers the years 1928 when my grandparents got married to 1946. I didn't read it until 2017. After that, I had to figure out what parts of it I might use and not use and how to shape the story from there.

Kousha Navidar: When you were reading that memoir, was there a detail that really stood out to you, or something that helped you shape the story?

Claire Messud: Well, there are so many details. Some of them really wonderful but also gossipy, but I couldn't use them all. I started I think for me to understand June 1940, which is the portion of the memoir that is fictionalized in the novel. Of course, hindsight is 2020 vision, but in 1940, in June, my grandfather had sent his family back to Algeria. He was on his own in Greece. He heard de Gaulle on the radio saying, "Come on, everybody, come and join the free French." He was choosing between wanting to find out where his family was and what seemed a sort of ethical but also weird choice. He didn't really know who this guy was. He didn't know much about what the call might mean, and he chose to try to find his family.

Kousha Navidar: What was it like for you, putting yourself in the shoes of so many different characters, having those characters be based on your real life?

Claire Messud: I think it's something I couldn't have done earlier in my life. I really do feel it's something that middle age [laughs] has enabled me to see clearly and understand. Also reading their letters, reading my grandfather's memoir, documents from before I was born, and being of an age now where I'm older than those people were when they wrote these letters, and just understanding aside from all the drama of being someone's kid and all that family nonsense that you're lumbered with, if I step outside that, they're people. Just people like you and me, striving, hoping, being disappointed.

Kousha Navidar: What is it about middle age that unlocks that? Because you said you're older than some of the characters that you're writing about. Is that what it is? You can understand their full experience in life at that moment that they were writing, or is it something different than that?

Claire Messud: Well, I think of it as almost a drone floating above, that I'm not embroiled in the same way. They're also no longer living. My grandparents and parents are no longer living. That may be part of it too.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Yes, sure. The novel spans from World War II to the present day. What was the research process like? Did you feel like you were able to capture all these different time periods with accuracy through the research?

Claire Messud: I hope so. Some people have asked me, is it fiction or nonfiction? Of course, all the characters are fictionalized. I'm making up people's thoughts. I'm making up what they're wearing and what they eat for dinner, but it is possible, thanks to the internet as well as books, to research a fair amount about these historical moments. For example, there's a section that takes place in the Algerian desert drilling for oil, and there is, in fact, a newsreel that you can find on YouTube from 1953, a French newsreel about an oil dig in the Algerian desert.

Kousha Navidar: It's wild that you can just have that so easily accessible to you, so versatile. It's wonderful. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Claire Messud, the author of the novel This Strange Eventful History. I want to point out again, she'll be speaking tonight at 7:00 at the Center for Fiction with Jennifer Egan. I'd love to get into Algerian colonialism a little bit, which is a huge theme in this book. This side of your family are what are called pied-noir, which for those who aren't familiar with the history, could you just explain what that means a little bit?

Claire Messud: The French colonized Algeria in 1830. I think it was a dispute over the fact that they claimed the Algerians owed them money. They just really wanted to take the land, so off they went. I think there's a distinction worth making. There are different sorts of colonialism. There's administrative colonialism where the colonizing country has no intention of settling many, many people there, but there's subtler colonialism, which is what the United States, Canada, Australia, and Algeria were. It's as if saying, "Well, nobody really lives here. Let's just move on in." Algeria was a Department of France. It was actually considered a Department of France until it gained independence in 1962 after a war that began in 1954. '54 to '62 was the War of Independence, but there had been even before that in the '40s. There had been uprisings and a movement for national independence.

Kousha Navidar: The story deals so much with François and Denise, who are the children of the patriarch and the matriarch that we are introduced to in the story. How do you think this dynamic affects them, first in the first section that you're going through and then throughout the rest of their lives?

Claire Messud: One of the things I wanted to try to capture was the way the same events are viewed differently depending on your moment in history and your cultural beliefs. For the grandparents' generation, it's not a fraught thing. They don't grow up feeling angst and distress about colonialism, but for people born in the '30s, which is the generation of François and Denise, in the post-war moment, which was a moment of national liberations around the world, it was really, you couldn't have an unconflicted relationship to colonialism, and those two characters respond very differently. François basically runs away to North America, begins a new life, and tries to put the whole history behind him. His sister cleaves to her parents and remains in a state of nostalgia and sorrow, and I might say even some bitterness, I think.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, and you see it ripple down through the next generation as well, right? Because then we have Chloe who has a different even version of what identity means for her, right?

Claire Messud: Right, absolutely. I think that there's a moment in the novel, which is a fictional moment, but where the Chloe character asks her grandfather, "Have you read Frantz Fanon?" Her grandfather says, "No. No, I haven't." Because that actually, I think is-- that's the reality.

Kousha Navidar: You had mentioned François running off to Massachusetts in the story. The story takes place in so many different places. There's Greece, Massachusetts, Algeria, Australia. How did you immerse yourself in these locations? Was there a lot of traveling?

Claire Messud: There was a little traveling. It's based on family history, so a certain amount of it-- or places that I've been along the way or have lived, but I did do some traveling. I went to Thessaloniki, which is the place in Greece. I went to Malta, even though it didn't end up in the book. I went to Beirut. Over the past decade, I went to a number of places. Then, some I had to make up. I did not get to Algiers-- [crosstalk]

Kousha Navidar: Oh, interesting. Yes, YouTube, you just look up-- [crosstalk]

Claire Messud: Yes. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Guided tours of YouTube.

Claire Messud: Exactly.

Kousha Navidar: When we meet Françoise at Amherst College, he's already trying to shed his French accent and his friends call him Frank, what did you want to demonstrate about the act of assimilation for François' character specifically?

Claire Messud: Well, I think there's good and bad in everything, right? One of the things I was struck by reading both family correspondence and histories of the time, the post-war moment was a really hopeful time, in part because the war had been so terrible, and everybody said, we're just going to put that behind us. We're just going to pack it away. There was very much an idea that you could reinvent yourself, become someone different. It didn't matter if you were unseen. It didn't matter if your history wasn't known. You could just be a new person. I think that only worked out so well over time, and I think it's something we're a lot more skeptical about now, this idea that you can just shed your past like a skin.

Kousha Navidar: There's also this big secret at the heart of the story that I don't want to reveal here, but you also take time getting to it in the novel. How did you decide when and how to reveal that secret?

Claire Messud: Well, I wanted it to come later in the narrative for a number of reasons, but when I'm teaching writing, I always say to my students, the order in which you give out information affects everything. I always use the example of the first thing certainly Isaac Kidd knew about the Germans was World War II. Then, when you learn about, I don't know, Beethoven, you're like, "Well, yes, because, look, we know who they are because of World War II." If you knew Beethoven first or sausages first, everything might look a little different.

Kousha Navidar: In an interview with Literary Hub, you point out the interesting use of numbers in your novel that I really want to point out. I thought it was cool. There are seven decades, five points of view, three points of view in almost all the sections, and 23 sections altogether. Each of those are prime numbers. You say they are misfit numbers because they're misfits. Was that on purpose, or like me, do you just really like math and you designed the novel that way?

Claire Messud: I designed the novel that way. It just made sense somehow-- [crosstalk]

Kousha Navidar: I just love that because I also have to point out, and stop me if you already know this, but I found that interesting because we also use prime numbers to encrypt data online, and it's literally how we encrypt our secrets. It's like the prime numbers are holding secrets.

Claire Messud: Oh, I didn't know that. I love that.

Kousha Navidar: It's so cool, right?

Claire Messud: Wow.

Kousha Navidar: I nerded out when I read that link from you. We're wrapping up here, but yesterday we had Jessica Lange, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Jim Parsons on the show to talk about their new show Mother Play, which looks at family. They were musing about what exactly it means to be a family. I wondered about your answer to that question after reading this novel. Is family just blood relation or is there something else that makes a family a family?

Claire Messud: A family can be a blood relation and it doesn't have to be at all. I actually had the joy last night of having dinner with a bunch of friends from college, which is now a while ago, even though, just a minute, just a minute.

Kousha Navidar: It's all how you frame it.

Claire Messud: That felt like family. I think that sense that you cannot see someone for seven years and no time has passed, that the love is-- I think, in an ideal state, family is love, it's also torture and anguish. [chuckles]

Kousha Navidar: In the last minute we have left, is there anything that you feel like you better understand about family after having written this novel?

Claire Messud: I do. I think that the spirit in which I wrote the novel, and that's part of the midlife thing, is one of love and compassion, that we're all flawed and we all make terrible mistakes, and it's okay. We're doing our best. Everybody's doing their best.

Kousha Navidar: If you want to read the book, it's called This Strange Eventful History. The author, Claire Messud, she'll be speaking tonight at 7:00 at the Center For Fiction with Jennifer Egan. Claire, thank you so much for coming by.

Claire Messud: Thank you so much.

 

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