Once upon a time, I thought of “history” and “story” as distinctly divergent terms: “history” implied a conscientious accounting of facts, whereas a “story” might involve facts but more often promised invention—a myth, a fairy tale improvised at bedtime, a lie. Then I moved to Italy. In Italian, storia is the word for both “history” and “story,” such that The Neverending Story and History of Western Philosophy both have storia in their titles, despite one being a novel set partly in “Fantastica” and the other a heavily footnoted doorstop by Bertrand Russell. (In other Romance languages, it’s a word closer to “history” that does this double duty, such as the French histoire.) Further muddling matters, according to the Italian classifica, memoirs and novels belong to the same literary genre, narrativa, a term suggesting that whether a story is spun from reality or imagination matters less than whether it’s simply a good yarn. Sometimes, in the nebulous land of narrativa, just over the Alps from autofiction’s lieu de naissance, it’s hard to know whether people here have always conflated fact with fiction or have been conditioned to do so by centuries of calling them by the same name.

Claire Messud’s exhilarating novel This Strange Eventful History is more story than history, though the blurrier storia comes closest to capturing how Messud coalesces the two. The novel follows four generations of the Cassars, a family of European descent who by World War I have “been from” Algeria for a hundred years. Algeria was “the part of France where they belonged, that they were still building and perfecting”—an ominous echo of “a more perfect Union” and America’s own colonialist inception. After a brief prologue, the book begins in June 1940 with the Germans invading Paris and Gaston Cassar working as a naval attaché for the French consulate in Salonica. Gaston’s wife, Lucienne, has left Greece to return to Algeria with the couple’s two young children, François and Denise, believing they will be safer south of the Mediterranean while Europe is at war. The Italians are about to join the conflict on the Nazis’ side, such that when Lucienne and the children cross Italy on their way to Algeria they must “hurry, hurry, before they were officially the enemy.” Ironic, this, given that to plenty of people in the country they were hurrying to they’d already been the enemy for years.

Diplomatic duties aside, Gaston suffers conflicting allegiances. He loves France and his native Algeria—for him Algeria is France—and he wants “to be part of the struggle, to fight honorably and, if need be, to die for his country.” But when de Gaulle invites French soldiers to take up the fight against Hitler by joining the Free France army in London, Gaston balks, heeding instead a longing felt in “every cell in his animal body”: to be reunited with his wife and children. From a note at the end of the book we learn that the Free France government later relocated its headquarters from London to Algiers, raising the question: Would Gaston have joined it had it been in Algiers all along? And: If it’s chance or convenience that lands you on the right side of history, are you any less worthy of the side? Considerations like these are endemic in this novel about “small lives” “buffeted by History,” including by becoming failed colonists in exile.

Messud has taken her title and the first of two epigraphs from Jaques’s famous speech in As You Like It, indicating that a certain tension between reality and artifice is afoot:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages…. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Messud’s “one man” is François Cassar, Gaston and Lucienne’s son, whose seven decades of life correspond with the novel’s seven “parts,” though each part recounts only a sliver of each decade, “almost like a probe going down into a moment,” Messud has said. From the moments probed, the Cassars’ story emerges against a muted backdrop of world events: in 1940 in L’Arba, eight-year-old François and six-year-old Denise race beetles and bicker over pastry while their father is ejected from a dinner at the Romanian consul’s house in Salonica. In 1952 François enrolls at Amherst on a Fulbright and spends Christmas in Florida followed by a boozy night in Batista’s Havana. By 1963 he’s at business school in Geneva and married to the Canadian Barbara, with whom he’ll have two daughters and move to Australia before returning to the US. Meanwhile, shortly before the Algerian War, Denise leaves Algiers for Lausanne, then Paris; her parents move to Morocco and then Buenos Aires, where Denise joins them until all three return east to settle in Toulon. Indeed, between their preparing to leave Beirut for Salonica in 1939 and François’s death in Connecticut in 2010, the Cassars will live on no fewer than six continents. Their scattered coordinates suggest a karmic restlessness: to the postcolonial pied-noir, nowhere ever really feels like home.

“Although this novel was inspired by the author’s family history,” we read in the book’s front matter, “this is a work of fiction and the usual rules apply.” Initially this seems a customary concession to our litigious times, but then in the end pages Messud returns, apparently voluntarily, to elaborate on the matter of what in her fiction is fact. Like Gaston and Lucienne, her own paternal grandparents were born in Algeria. Like Gaston Cassar, Gaston Messud wrote a memoir. And, as Gaston Cassar’s granddaughter will do, Messud read her grandfather’s unpublished memoir, parts of which became “the beginning of this project.” Adding to the sense of the novel as contiguous with the world outside its covers are its many cameos by real people: Gloria Steinem, Raymond Aron, Toni Morrison, Bob Hawrylyshyn (an unmakeupable name), François Mitterrand, Roger-Patrice Pelat, Jacques Derrida, and, at a memorial reading for Raymond Carver, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and “was that Richard Ford?” In Buenos Aires, Denise works for Lili Lebach, the actual German owner of an actual bookstore called Pigmalion, where Denise meets Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, and Sabato’s wife, Matilde, who “always smiled warmly at Denise, as if to communicate that she knew what it was like to be overlooked and yet to believe oneself worthy nonetheless.” In 1953, while still a law student in Algiers, Denise is knocked to the ground by a car whose passenger looks like the FLN fighter Zohra Drif. Three and a half years later, the real Drif bombed Algiers’s Milk Bar café, killing and wounding pieds-noirs in the name of Algerian independence—and, in This Strange Eventful History, causing Denise to wonder whether the hit-and-run wasn’t an accident but “an early salvo of the insurgency.”

The bombing of a café popular with pieds-noirs by a female FLN militant is the subject of a scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Like that film, which was shot in black and white and used mostly nonprofessional actors playing real and composite people, Messud’s novel has the feel of events caught rather than staged, even as it’s lush with poetic detail and intimate psychological characterization. Unlike Pontecorvo’s film, Messud’s book relates mostly personal moments peripheral to History—peripherally being how many of us experience momentous historical events. Messud pairs her “seven ages” epigraph with one from Elias Canetti’s Notes from Hampstead:

His life, in which nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war…. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.

Much of what gives This Strange Eventful History its profound dimension of feeling and thought is how vividly and generously Messud ventriloquizes her many characters’ minds. Most of the novel’s subchapters are narrated in a free indirect style bound up in the consciousness of François, Gaston, Denise, or Barbara. The exceptions are four chapters narrated in the first person by François’s younger daughter, Chloe, whom we meet in Australia as a darkly funny, anxiety-prone seven-year-old who loves Tintin and “secretly” believes in God; she grows up to become a writer with a biography closely resembling Messud’s. (The prologue is also in the first person, suggesting retrospectively that the entire novel is Chloe’s work.) There’s also an “interlude” whose narration initially trails François but then gets hijacked by a “we”—party guests gathered in Toulon in August 1978 to celebrate Gaston and Lucienne’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. By the end of the interlude, one or more of the “we” seem to have followed François and Barbara back to their room to overhear a tense exchange about the Cassars’ other foundational shame—the exact nature of which isn’t confirmed until the novel’s epilogue, which resumes the perspective conjoined with Gaston’s.

For all this baton passing, the novel reads with a gorgeous fluidity, its perspectives changing subtly, sometimes within a single paragraph. Observations that could be attributed to a character, the narrator, or both imbue small details with resonance, as when Gaston wipes his mouth using a consulate napkin embroidered with France’s escutcheon: “Someone had sewn the stitches; someone had ironed the linen. So many lives in their hands.” The frequent yet judicious interpolation of French captures how multilingual people think and speak: with much spontaneous toggling and only intermittently conscious association. With Lili Lebach, “Denise inhabited herself fully, she felt bien dans sa peau.” It wouldn’t do as well to use the English here—to say that Denise felt at ease—because Denise feels most at ease in French, inhabiting it like a skin. While François walks his dog in America, a light rain falls “at an angle, hitting him in the face—the word crachat came to mind; though to whom might he say it?” And though three times in the novel the teenage years are referred to as “the ungrateful age,” it’s the first reference, when the expression appears also in French, that’s most evocative, because l’âge ingrat sounds more deliciously sullen, and grating, as adolescent ingratitude can be.

Often Messud introduces new information indirectly, via her characters’ circuitous ruminations. Here is François, now fifty-seven and living in Connecticut, trying and failing not to drink vodka:

He consulted his watch. Not time for another glass, not if he wanted to be sure [Barbara] didn’t find out. He very much didn’t want her to know. He didn’t think Chloe had told her about Christmas, though who could be sure? Barb hadn’t referred to it, and she wasn’t good at hiding her feelings. Then again, maybe she was trying to be more sympathetic, kinder to him, because of the scandal at work.

This is the first we’ve heard of either “Christmas” or the scandal at work. Messud then puts the narrative in reverse to describe both episodes and François’s feverish obsession with them while he drinks more vodka and walks his dog in the spitting rain. Elsewhere Messud telescopes years and even decades, interjecting a sudden rush of temporal omniscience, as when François reflects, in January 1963, on his friendship with Larry Riley—but then the reflecting slides through the present and into the future to project an impossible knowledge of what will befall both men over the next half-century:

For almost fifty years, across continents and through joys and tragedies (oh, when Larry’s boy David died in a sailing accident, and Larry called, and François got on the plane and went—), Larry Riley would remain his closest and truest friend…. And as if the divine would bind them only ever closer to the end, Riley would share with Barb the awful fate of Lewy body dementia…[and] Riley would die just three months and ten days after François.

In these ways, though the parts corresponding with François’s seven ages proceed chronologically, the narrative is more sinuous, as the prologue predicts: “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” (A description in Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady (1994), comes to mind: “No past, no future, just a strong sense of her grave mistakes.”) As the prologue’s narrator also tells us: “I’m a writer; I tell stories…. I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.” The insistent, wavelike rhythms of This Strange Eventful History, so many adjectives and apposite clauses tumbling forth, are hypnotic, and come to seem the ideal style for someone racing to describe as much as possible—to “save life”—before perception cedes to oblivion.

All these feats of mimesis make the novel feel deeply real. At the same time, Messud impishly alludes to the elusive nature of authenticity. Comparing his granddaughters, Chloe and Loulou, Gaston considers Chloe, the future novelist, “cute, yes, but always performing, less true.” At the anniversary party, a photographer tells assembled guests, “‘Look natural!’…surely aware this was an impossible request.” “Life…was not a fiction,” adult Chloe observes:

When I read a novel or watched a film, I could so often predict what would happen next. Plot felt to me inevitable. But in life, turns were not programmed or decided, and we had agency over only some small aspects of our stories. Implacable chance ruled.

“When a writer is born into a family,” Czesław Miłosz reportedly warned, “the family is finished.” We know what this means; we all have what my husband tactfully refers to as “foibles.” Out of mercy or cowardice or both, many writers wait until their parents die to put them in a book—though there’s also another, arguably nobler reason to wait, one Messud has cited: sometimes it’s only later in life that we can see a parent as a person—someone with needs, desires, and disappointments separate from, even preexisting, our own.

In This Strange Eventful History, there is a sense of belated atonement on the part of Messud’s avatar, Chloe, for not having better understood and appreciated her elder relatives sooner. (In this spirit, Messud’s project is reminiscent of Ayad Akhtar’s 2020 novel Homeland Elegies, whose narrator says of his mother, “In expecting what she couldn’t give me, hadn’t I rejected what she could?”) Not that Chloe or Messud whitewashes the Cassars—nor is Chloe implausibly without foibles of her own. She’s snobbish about her grandfather’s health aide (“The sartorial misfortune!”) and, at twenty-three, counters others’ attempts to widen her lens on colonialism with the hotheaded hubris of youth. (In Chloe’s defense, she’s the one who’s read Frantz Fanon.) Contemplating her nieces after this exchange, Chloe’s aunt Denise

had to remind herself that if these kids knew no history, understood nothing of the past, didn’t know where they came from, it was because this was what François had wanted for them, marrying Barbara and raising their children in a different language, a different—or no!—religion, and an unrecognizable culture, so that for all their endless lessons they still had foreign accents and searched for their words—if they didn’t have the vocabulary, how could they be expected to know who, by accursed birthright, they were?

The term for this accursed birthright, pied-noir, may have originated as a reference to native Algerians working barefoot in the coal bunkers of ships before it was appropriated by the mainland French to mean Europeans born in Algeria. Other theories involve the French soldiers’ black boots, or settlers working in Algerian swamps or stomping on grapes to make wine. None of these etymologies suggests a term born of respect. “France’s error made flesh,” reflects Sagesse, the narrator of Messud’s second novel, The Last Life (1999), “the pieds-noirs, and with them, the harkis, were guilty simply for existing.”

In This Strange Eventful History, Denise’s actual or imagined run-in with Zohra Drif is the closest any of the Cassars comes to Algeria’s political violence, but this doesn’t mean they escape the country intact. “The suitcase or the coffin,” the pieds-noirs were warned: leave Algeria or die. In a sense, the elder Cassars do both. By leaving Algeria, they become ghosts of their former selves, citizens of a stateless limbo. Here is Denise after moving to Paris, where it seems the metropolitan French don’t even regard the pieds-noirs as compatriots:

“Mais comment ça, mademoiselle, vous parlez si bien le français!” she’d heard more than once, as though the piggish Parisians thought, perhaps, that everyone in Algiers spoke only Arabic? And she had certainly heard them say, at dinner parties, “To hell with the pieds-noirs, we’ve got nothing to do with them”—when they all carried the same passport! And she’d heard them complain about the harkis, the courageous Algerians who’d risked and lost everything for France, calling them bougnoules…but it turned out that France was not only indifferent but thoroughly ungrateful, unwelcoming—how to reconcile being French and not French at the same time?

What it means to be of a place is an abiding motif for Messud. In When the World Was Steady, a British divorcée living in Australia goes alone on holiday to Bali, where she yearns to have “been born into this world, to be a part of it rather than a white ghost passing through.” The Last Life is also about a partly pied-noir family and begins with Sagesse sounding a little like an old-world Augie March: “I am American now, but this wasn’t always so.” There are references to “an Algeria no longer French, no longer Catholic,” and the “personal heritage” of North Africa’s Europeans being “the doctrine of Original Sin.” As Sagesse prepares to leave France for boarding school in Massachusetts, a friend encourages her: “It’s much cooler to be the French girl in America than the American girl here.” It doesn’t work out that way for François, in This Strange Eventful History, upon arriving at Amherst. Even with the other French students, François feels suspect, “foreign…a (mostly) white colonial African from that mysterious terrain across the Mediterranean.” As his fraternity’s lone, quota-filling foreigner, he’s assigned to room with its only Jew.

But what does it mean to be of a place when, as Barbara observes in 1962, the “world is getting smaller and we’re all more international”? How does having this or that passport inform our identities when countries themselves have inconsistent values and reputations? (“This is America, right?” a French classmate asks François when they arrive in Key West on Christmas break.) The words “native” and “nationality” both come from the Latin nasci, “to be born,” but in plenty of countries being born there doesn’t automatically make you a national. In Italy, where the rule is jus sanguinis, or “right of the blood,” instead of jus soli, “right of the soil,” my daughter, who was born in Milan and has lived in Italy her entire life, does not have Italian nationality, because her parents are of American and British “blood.” More than six decades after Barbara declared the world to be shrinking, some of our restrictions on international movement can seem farcically antiquated and bureaucratic, even as we recognize their utility, like that of the metal maze we’re forced to zigzag through toward passport control even when no one else is in line. Maturity might make us more clear-eyed and analytical about our allegiances, but patriotism tends to involve, too, a subliminal emotionality akin to nostalgia, or “anemoia”—nostalgia for a time or place that one has never directly experienced.

And it doesn’t take exile for one to feel like an outsider, or unworthy. In 1957 Barbara freely marries François (“Absurdly, blinded by love—or lust, was it?”), but seventeen years later she wonders, “How could she have tied herself to this strange French family in the first place?” Among the ways Barbara’s French Catholic in-laws seem strange to her is their apparent conviction that “women are put on this earth to marry and bear children.” The elder Cassars also give the impression that “daughters were alas second best” and that cooking and serving “three bloody courses” at every meal is “all women’s work” that Chloe and her sister are being trained to do “from the get-go.” Not only in Barbara’s perception do these ideas about the fairer sex exist. Denise recalls how her mother would say, “‘Sons leave home’…implying thereby that daughters did not.” Even seven-year-old Chloe, in 1974, has internalized that her sister “is strong like a boy and I am weak like a girl.” Also in 1974 Gaston wonders, “What did François break his back for, if not to be certain that his children could come home after school to their mother?” And this gem: “It still amazed him when women wore trousers.” When Chloe announces at sixteen her ambition to become a writer, her father replies, “But CloClo…only geniuses can be writers.” No one adds that only men can be geniuses, but I was helpless not to have the thought.

In 1995 Granta published a short story by Messud entitled “The Professor’s History.” Set around 1915, this little histoire begins with a French history professor on his way to visit two caves in northern Algeria where, seven decades earlier, French soldiers asphyxiated hundreds of Algerians. As far as the professor is aware, no written record of the killings exists, except in a letter a French colonel sent to his brother. “You are the first Frenchman in my lifetime to want to visit the cave,” a local Algerian boy tells the professor. “You shouldn’t have come. It is better left buried.”

The professor embarks on his trip with certain prejudices against the “Oriental character,” which he perceives as lacking “compassion, the civilized impulse,” and respect for history. As his journey progresses, however, and particularly after he meets a pompous fellow Frenchman working as a local administrator, the professor gains sympathy for France’s Algerian victims. “We must learn from the past before mistakes are made,” he tells the incurious administrator. “For the progress of France, here and at home, the truth must be known. Knowledge…is the only salvation.”

“What good is it?” replies the administrator. “What difference will it make, to tell your story, even if it is true?’”

The professor is left to wonder whether anyone will read what he writes about the massacres. On the other hand, “What might be the consequences of silence?” The story ends with the professor visiting a library containing “mementoes of his ancestors’ conquest”:

There, carefully stored in a cupboard in the corner, was a large jar of tinted liquid, in which swam a swarm of pinkish shrimp-like creatures. These perfect curls, some still trailing strands of hair, no two quite alike, were the preserved ears of native rebels, claimed by the French as a warning and a marker in the early days of the colony. For seventy or more years they had floated in their brine, waiting, listening for something unheard. For them, the professor decided at last, if only to them, he would tell his story.

Why humanity should know the murdered Algerians’ story seems clear. Less clear is what virtuous imperative there may be in reading about those who, like the Cassars, inherited the murderers’ spoils. But like Chekhov with his horse thieves, or Flaubert (“The task at hand is not to change [humanity], but to know it”), Messud values fiction less for telling us how we should be than for revealing to us how we are.

The word palimpsest repeats in Messud’s work—in her third novel, The Emperor’s Children (2006), a character feels herself to be “a palimpsest, many people, all at once”—and seems useful in theorizing what might be the most faithful and conscientious version of any story: a palimpsest of as many perspectives as we can get. The truth of colonized Algeria isn’t only the Cassars’ story, just as it isn’t only Albert Camus’s, Frantz Fanon’s, or Zohra Drif’s. It’s a palimpsest, of the unrecorded stories, too, including those of the women busy with their three bloody courses and “the young girls beginning to be emancipated” in Children of the New World (1962) by Assia Djebar, a pseudonym assumed by Fatima-Zohra Imalayen so that she might not anger her Muslim father by publishing a novel.

“Literature—” says the bookstore owner Lili Lebach, in This Strange Eventful History. “Now, that’s a religion I can believe in. That is perhaps my God.” (Saying it, she “stabbed at the air with her cigarette, making smoke stream from her nostrils like a dragon”—a detail that turns her into a mythical creature just as she’s taking down the credulous devout.) A quarter-century later, reflecting on the fatwa against Rushdie, Chloe declares, “To send a construct of words into the world…so that we might all share (and yet individually create) an experience as real as if it had been lived…this was communication, my religion’s communion.” Such is the gift of this novel: so many lives in our hands.