This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.
Like all of July’s work, “All Fours” is a wild ride. It is deeply funny and achingly true. On what she feels is her marital responsibility to her husband, the narrator tells readers “sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.” While making lunch for her child, she relates: “The problem wasn’t the lunch, it was what came after, the whole rest of my life.” When she feels shame about spending hours on the phone with her best friend, Jordi, she remembers: “It was my one chance a week to be myself.”
In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader’s relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.
Polizzotti’s thesis is that Surrealism matters not only because the movement anticipated many of the progressive positions of our present moment, but also because its abiding faith in imaginative freedom and irrationality are tools that “we today might mobilize” in our efforts to envision a better and more just world. Polizzotti remains committed to this position even if, as he clearly acknowledges, the French Surrealists often fell short of their own ideals. The movement sought to align itself with anti-colonialism and with the people of the Global South, even as it practiced its own forms of Orientalism and exoticism, and even though, as Hal Foster writes, “colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility.” It sought to deploy “the subversive power of Eros” to challenge patriarchal norms, even as women involved in the movement were often relegated to the role of muse. For Polizzotti, these blind spots should not be ignored, but they should also not negate the movement’s broader significance.
In Amphibious Soul, Foster tells how the sea, or, as he refers to it, “Big Mother”, has healed him, both physically and spiritually. He’s referring to one patch of ocean in particular: the Great African Sea Forest, a wilderness of swaying kelp, sharks and violent waves off the Cape. This was where his actual mother swam, with Foster in her belly, until the day he was born; it’s where his father informally baptised him; and it’s where the adult Foster experiences a kind of rebirth and develops extraordinary relationships with its non-human residents.