This Strange Eventful History

By: Claire Messud

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force … one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

“A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud’s epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become ‘colonized’ by family.”—Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus

©2024 Claire Messud (P)2024 Recorded Books

Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration

I had been looking forward to listening to this new book by Claire Messud, both for her reputation as a writer and for the subject matter. I purchased the audiobook on the day of publication. Cassandra Campbell has a lovely voice, and I enjoyed her reading of Where the Crawdads Sings. However. A big however. In this book, the characters are multinational, many of them multilingual, with complex personal histories in Beirut, Algiers, Salonica, Paris, Poland, and elsewhere. Understandably, this presents a challenge in voicing the different characters with regard to their accents. Unfortunately, Ms. Campbell, apparently with the assent of the recording's director, has opted for an unbelievably heavy approach, especially with the French accent for the central characters. The "zeess" and "zatt" for "this" and "that" are so thick you can cut them with a couteau - to the point of parody. This is apparent very early in the book with the two young French pied-noir children, a brother and sister, who are in exile in Algiers, and who speak to each other in such heavy French accents that you cannot avoid thinking of Loony Tunes' Pepe Le Pew. Such exaggerated accents are absurd for a brother and sister who would of course hear each other entirely without accent. A light touch to indicate character and native tongue would have been so welcome - a masterful example is David Pittu's narration of Fernando Aramburu's "Homeland", where the characters toggle between Spanish and Basque. Unfortunately, Ms. Campbell seems to treat this narration as an opportunity to demonstrate her prowess with various accents. This range would be amusing, even impressive, as an audition tape, but as the narration for a serious work of fiction, it is impossible to ignore the overkill, and has just about spoiled the book for me. I hope it does not for you, but I recommend listening to the sample before purchasing. I'm sorry to write such a negative review, but this could so easily have been avoided with a firmer hand from the production staff.