This Strange Eventful History

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Parts 2-3

Parts 4-5

Part 6-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Places and Spaces: Paris, Algiers, The Mediterranean Region, and Gaston’s Toulon Apartment

In the world of This Strange Eventful History, places and spaces symbolize identity and home. Paris is one of the novel’s first settings and is a significant place for the family. The story begins as nine-year-old François composes a letter to his father in Greece and contemplates whether to mention the Nazi occupation of France’s capital city. As he writes, he reflects on what Paris means to him: As a young French Algerian boy, he understands himself as French and Paris as his capital city. However, as a member of the pieds-noirs community, he identifies himself as French Algerian. He muses that he has never, in fact, been to France and that for him France is a kind of abstraction. He has a much more concrete sense of himself as French Algerian, although he spent the bulk of his youth outside Algeria too. Paris and France thus symbolize a fraught cultural identity that is difficult to access but always in the background for French Algerians.

Algeria too becomes a complex symbol. For Gaston and Lucille’s generation, it initially symbolizes home and identity. More so than their children or grandchildren, they understand their identity through the context of French colonialism and the interplay between French and French Algerian history and customs. However, in the wake of Algerian independence, Algeria and the city of Algiers become symbols of lost identity and lost homeland. The French Algerian community never again finds the kind of foothold that it had in French Algeria, and nowhere else in the world do they feel as at home as they did in French Algeria.

For François and his generation, the Mediterranean region also become an important symbol of home. He didn’t have the kind of connection his parents did to Algeria itself and feels only obliquely French, developing a sort of hazy appreciation for the broader Mediterranean, and he returns to the blue of its waters and skies in his mind during the cold North American winters, which he finds difficult. For François, “home” becomes the Mediterranean region as a whole. “Home” is a shifting category for the other Cassars as well. For Chloe, “home” becomes the Toulon apartment in which Gaston and Denise ultimately settle. Toulon is in the south of France, on the coast. The apartment is simultaneously French (because it is in France), Mediterranean (because it is on the Mediterranean Sea), and North African (albeit obliquely) because Toulon has a large North African community and was a place where many pieds-noirs settled.

Catholicism

Religion, particularly Catholicism, is important to several members of the Cassar family and within the novel as a whole. Although France overtly celebrates secularity, the Catholic Church has long been influential there. It’s central to how many French citizens, especially those born during the period the novel depicts, view their French identity. For Gaston and Lucienne (and most real-life pieds-noirs), Catholicism is one of the primary points of connection between the French Algerian community and France. Although they feel deeply connected to Algeria, they also see themselves as fundamentally French. In this way, the motif of Catholicism connects to the theme of Displacement, Rootlessness, and Belonging.

The Cassars “belong” to a broader French cultural group in part through practicing France’s unofficial religion, and they try to impart Catholic values to their children. That Denise becomes devout while François eschews faith and organized religion reflects the difficulty of maintaining cultural ties in exile. Denise values religion because it gives her a sense of being both French and French Algerian. François, however, spends less time in France than Denise and is less bothered than she is by the stigma of being a pied-noir. He forsakes religion and adopts a kind of international cosmopolitanism. Unlike his parents, he and Barbara don’t teach their own daughters to value religion. Nevertheless, Chloe develops an interest in Catholicism. That she finds herself drawn to God and the Catholic Church gestures toward the possibility of maintaining cultural connection to colonial identity in a post-colonial world: She’s of the younger generation, who were born without a strong connection to either France or French Algeria. Chloe’s embracing the religion cast aside by her parents but beloved by her grandparents demonstrates the strength of both familial and cultural ties in exile.

War

Another important motif in the novel is war. The novel begins with the onset of World War II but also depicts the beginning and aftermath of the Algerian war for independence. The novel’s engagement with various international conflicts explores the theme of The Interplay Between Personal and Historical Narratives in that it becomes evident that major historical events like war have a profound impact on the Cassar family’s trajectory. France’s very presence in Algeria began with conflict: The French invasion initiated the many years of colonial occupation. Without conflict, Gaston and Lucienne’s families would have remained in France, and they both would have had entirely different lives. Although Gaston’s career with the Navy began during peacetime, it was possible because France had a vested interest in protecting its presence in the Mediterranean and maintaining its role within the fraught geopolitical framework of the colonial world.

World War II effectively alters the family’s trajectory, leading François to attend university in the US. War again disrupts the family when Algeria wins independence from France, and they’re forever displaced from French Algeria, a country that no longer exists. At this point, identity becomes even more complex and convoluted for the Cassar family: The pieds-noirs community had long occupied a precarious, hard-to-define identitarian position somewhere between French and French Algerian, but in the wake of Algerian independence, in a sense they don’t feel able to claim French Algerian identity anymore. Denise and Gaston feel the loss of French Algerian identity most acutely, and though Gaston later admits the utter folly of colonialism, he still feels nostalgic for the colonial period and considers himself a product of the French colonial project. Denise never reconciles her beliefs with the cause of Algerian independence, and even late in life cites the Algerian war for independence as a critical point of rupture in her life’s trajectory.