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 irrelevant backwater.”
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