A tour of Claire Messud’s private library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Heritage

This Strange Eventful History, Messud’s eighth book, is her most autobiographical. The journey of a pied-noir family, the Cassars – which begins in the French colonial empire of Lebanon and Algiers, then spreads to Switzerland and France, and finally reaches Argentina and Australia, Canada and the United States – mirrors her own family’s dispersion across the globe. Towards the end of the book, a character visits her grandfather’s old apartment and looks at a shelf of thick red folders containing his memoirs: “a treasure that was beyond my reach, but which I knew I would one day read in full – it was, after all, our inheritance, addressed to us.”

The patriarch, Gaston Cassar, is modeled on Messud’s grandfather, who served as a French naval attaché in Beirut before World War II and wrote a 1,500-page family history for Messud and her sister in the 1970s. Messud is the keeper of the six volumes.

“He was very neat,” she noted, flipping through pages covered with old letters, passports, visas, ration cards and photographs. In one letter, she told her grandfather, full of regret, that the ship carrying all the family’s belongings from their home in Thessaloniki, Greece, had been torpedoed; he kept the ship’s manifest, which detailed what had been lost. “I shouldn’t laugh,” Messud told herself, translating the message aloud from French.

“I always think that someone, some archive, would want them, but I’ve talked to a few people and it doesn’t seem like people…” she said, trailing off. “I don’t know if my children would want to keep them.”

Messud has also kept many of her father’s old math notebooks from his school days, along with old Middle Eastern history books from his time as a graduate student at Harvard. Partly through him, she has amassed a small collection of books by and about Albert Camus: his early essay collection, Noces, published in Algiers in a small edition of about 1,000 copies (“it’s a little foxed”); a special edition of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise published after the author’s death; a coffee-table book by his daughter Catherine Camus. Her father also collected copies of Pléiade (“too valuable to throw away, I’m sure”), which Messud keeps in her office.

Both of Messud’s parents were “big readers,” and the shelves in their home in Canada were crammed two floors high with books. “The big challenge after they died” was getting rid of the volumes, she said. “One of the things we know is that nobody wants the books.” She looked at her own shelves and assessed. “Can we get rid of some of these before we die so the kids don’t have to deal with them?”