PARADISE LOST

The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.

- JENNIFER WILSON

What becomes of an attaché when the country he is attached to vanishes? In "This Strange Eventful History," by Claire Messud, a thirty-four-year-old French naval officer in Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) learns that Nazi troops have breached the gates of Paris. Every matter is suddenly a pressing one, even his attendance at a cocktail reception at the Romanian consul's home that evening. Should he go? If so, who, exactly, would he be representing? "We haven't ceased to exist. We haven't ceased to be French," he tells himself, trying to make it true. The naval attaché, Gaston Cassar, had been sent to Salonica the year before, in 1939, to spy on Mussolini's men in the Aegean Sea. But now, with the theatre of war shifted, he finds himself marooned in a "remote and backwater."

Feeling "rudderless," Gaston lies on his bed, a crucifix hovering on the wall above him. Looking down at his own naked, forsaken body, he sees a man "far from combat, womanish, a eunuch cowering at the sidelines of the war,"his penis "dangling uselessly." He has two options to revive his manhood: he can bravely heed the call of Charles de Gaulle, who, by radio, urges all French soldiers who "want to remain free" to make their way to London to join the Resistance, or he can take a post in Beirut that would safely reunite him with his wife, Lucienne. The latter, however, would mean serving the Vichy regime. Love of country thus becomes a question of love or country. Gaston answers his siren's call, reasoning that he and Lucienne are "two halves from Plato's Symposium, who had found each other and their life's purpose."Theirs is a love so fervent that it triumphs over nationalism, a different mythos of the unified whole.