This Strange Eventful History

In the prologue, Chloe declares: “I’m a writer; I tell stories. Of course, really, I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life” (3). Why do you think Claire Messud begins the novel this way?

After the cockfight in Havana, François, drunk, smelling, ashamed, has one line stuck in his head: “The ride home—home, faint as a mirage—was a sunk cost” (91). What do you suppose this means? How does “home” for the Cassars evolve over the years? Is it a culture, a physical location, a temporal time, or certain people?

Chloe is the only character who gets to narrate the story from a first-person perspective. Why do you think Messud chose her as the voice to tell this story?

Gaston has strong expectations of excellence for François that François struggles with throughout his life. How does François follow or rebel against his father’s plans for him? Does François’s admiration for his father’s way of life constrain and hinder his own happiness?

The Cassars are often separated from each other by great distances, choosing to omit information in their letters and phone calls to each other. As a child, François gets anxious if what he writes is “cheerful” enough for his father (10). Later, Denise chooses not to inform François of their mother’s medical troubles, understanding that this was “how you took care of people” by “pretending you were fine” (97). Discuss the ways in which keeping information from loved ones serves or doesn’t serve the relationships in this book.

Child Chloe remarks that “I believe that if I imagine the worst things I can keep them from happening, just like I believe that if I notice everything and think of everything ahead of time—if I tell the story beforehand—I can keep us all safe” (220). In what ways do attention and imagination shape the narrative perspective of this novel? Thematically, what does this narrative perspective convey?

“The future is in English,” Gaston is told by an old friend he had hoped to ask for a job (118). At the end of her father’s life, Chloe notes, François was spoken to “at the last, in his mother tongue, the language of his lost life, in French” (415). How is language fluency tied to the social and economic possibilities of different characters? Which characters speak French or English with accents, and how does their ability to notice or be noticed for it mark their relationship with empire?

The same story about Lucienne deciding not to learn to drive so as not to argue with Gaston is relayed twice in the book: first by Gaston, who finds it a mark of her sweetness and devotion, and then by Barbara, who hears it as a patriarchal dependence. How does Barbara’s idea of being a wife, a mother, a woman differ from Lucienne’s?

The title of the book, This Strange Eventful History, is referenced twice—once by Denise (405), once by Chloe (324). Chloe ruminates: “Beyond the most immediate, you can’t choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.” What is the significance of this title to the novel’s exploration of family, history, and intergenerational resonance?

“We are always already guilty. If we don’t know history, we’re doomed.” Gaston observes in a conversation about Algerian independence and histories of colonization (311). Can this be applied to anything else in the novel? Discuss the relationship between disclosure, history, guilt, and fate.

In a cast of main characters who all choose to marry and have children, Denise is single and remains unmarried throughout the novel. How does this affect how her parents, François, Barbara, and others see and treat her? How do their attitudes reveal their ideas about what marriage or love means to a conception of adulthood or life?

Several of the characters nurse dreams that never come to fruition, or ponder deep life choices they decide it is too late to make. Gaston dreams of being a writer but ultimately gives up. François carries around a suitcase with his unfinished thesis for years but in retirement does not pursue his many abandoned hobbies. Barbara grows to think her relationship with François is a mistake but laments that after a certain amount of time it is too late to leave. Is it really too late for Barbara to pursue the passions and choices that are important to her? What is Messud saying about the relationship between choice and circumstance here?

Chloe stumbles upon Denise’s Buenos Aires diary and has a realization that her aunt has experienced a deeply impactful love, if not traditionally realized. Is Denise’s love, as Chloe wonders, “less real for existing only in her head”? Is it a truer or less real love than that of Barbara and François?

National identity is a major thematic concern in the book, particularly for Gaston and François. How does each of them conceptualize what it means to be “French” or to call Algeria home? For each of the Cassars, is national identity tied to place, culture, language, or a particular societal order?

“The problem of our century—or maybe just the problem of mankind—is a refusal to take responsibility, to lead properly.” Gaston says to Barbara, after François calls about the fatal car accident of employees at his company (235). Throughout the novel, how do you think conceptions of personal or familial responsibility differ between different generations, or between different characters?

Illness and death are forces that pull the characters together again and again in this novel. What does it mean to care for those who are ill? How does being unwell at different points in their life affect Lucienne, Gaston, Denise, François, and Barbara?

We are told at the start of the novel that there is a secret “shame” at the heart of the family history. Halfway through the novel, Barbara tells François she would not have married him if she knew. Yet we don’t learn what it is until the epilogue. How does this information affect or reframe the novel? What are the implications of Messud’s choice to reveal this piece of information at the very end?