Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

An Evening with Claire Messud

Tue, November 19, 2024
Dinner Program
Claire Messud

Join Guggenheim- and Radcliffe Fellow-winning writer Claire Messud for a reading of her latest fiction, followed by a discussion with CMC's own Professor of Literature Leland de la Durantaye. 

Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, was one of Oprah Daily's Most Anticipated Books of 2024, and one of New York Magazine's "23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024." 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).

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady (1995), and her book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. Her novel, The Emperor’s Children (2006), was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. All four books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is also the author of a collection of nonfiction personal essays, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write
An Autobiography through Essays (2020). Messud has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family. 

Professor Leland de la Durantaye is a critic, translator and professor. He taught at the École Normale Supérieure and at Harvard for many years and now lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. His journalism and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Artforum, The Believer, Cabinet, and others. De la Durantaye is also a translator from the French and Italian; his translation of the Jacques Jouet novel Upstaged (2011) was a finalist for the PEN Best Translated Book of the Year. His nonfiction books are Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), and Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (2016). He has also published a novel, Hannah Versus the Tree (2018).

Messud's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Literature Department and the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World at CMC.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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