The multigenerational saga is as old as The Mahabharata, but contemporary authors still put their own spins on the genre. An erudite example is This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud's epic recounting of seven decades of a pied-noir family--those of European descent born in Algeria before the country's 1962 independence from France. The story of the Cassars, based on Messud's family, begins in 1940, when military attaché Gaston is sent to Greece to find out what "the fascist Italians" are "up to in Albania." Yet he feels "trapped in this remote and irrelevant backwater," in part because he misses his family, including wife Lucienne, with whom he struggles to maintain an aura of an ideal marriage, and their two children: François, the older child, and Denise, who fears the Nazis plan to kill their father.
Messud (The Woman Upstairs; The Burning Girl) follows her characters through multiple locales, from Algeria to Toronto, Buenos Aires to Sydney. Her novel changes perspectives throughout, with chapters devoted to Denise's piousness, which stems from the family's Catholic upbringing; François's rejection of their father's wish that he study science and his pursuit of a business degree in Paris instead, because he wants "to conquer the world"; François's marriage to Barbara, a Canadian woman he meets at Oxford; and Chloe, one of their two daughters, whose determination to become a writer is complicated by concern over her aging relatives. Messud's chronicle of one family's history, the political events that shape them, and "these strange, beautiful, appalling times" in which they live is as fine a family saga as one will read. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer