Sagesse was born in Southern France, but is now an American due to past challenges her family faced. Sagesse embraces Americas opportunities and free choices, and she compares life in America to life in France. Sagesses past was formed by adultery, suicide, and exile. She wants to study her family's history and learn more about her ancestors and father. Now living in New York, and attending Columbia University and studying the history of ideas, Sagesse reaches out to her mother and grandmother in hopes of learning about her father and why their family was forced to leave France. Sagesse wants to better her future by having a deeper understanding of her past.

Something I liked about this book was that it was easy to connect and relate to. I also like this book because it talks about Identity, culture, and starting fresh. One thing I didn't like about this book was the plot was hard to follow at times.

I recommend this book to anyone that likes realistic fiction or coming-of-age.

I’m afraid I found this very disappointing, in spite of the fact that I’m interested in Algeria and the history of the French there. The POV character is teenaged Sagesse, whose French grandparents got out of Algiers just before it was too late. They bought and ran a hotel across the Meditteranean in the south of France. Sagesse’s father was a womanizing fellow, married to an American woman and kept down by the heavy thumb of his tyrannical father. Early on, the family is shamed when the domineering grandfather shoots his rifle randomly into the hotel swimming pool where Sagesse and her friends are playing around. Although this is put forth as a defining incident in the story, the motivation is never explored. Most of the story is the musings of Sagesse as a teen, her thoughts about her severely disabled brother, her unhappy American mother, her mostly-absent father, and a few friends who drift through the years. I didn’t find any characters likable and, in spite of some nice prose, I didn’t enjoy reading the rambling introspective thoughts of this teen. I ended up skimming great portions of the book and thus gave it only 2 stars.

Coming of age novel embedded in three generation history spanning Algeria, France, US. Beautifully written, totally believable.

Claire Messud is a gifted writer and every line is crafted. I found myself unable to put this book down because of her beautiful prose, but the storyline utself was mediocre. I found the same kind of letdown at the end of this novel as her previous novel, "The Emperor's Children". What was it really all about in the end and what larger truth about life was revealed? I'm still not sure, but would probably still read her next book to see if her stories can grow as compelling as her writing.

I don't know what it is about Messud's writing that I like but her books draw me in. As I've written in my review of The Emperor's Children, I'm not a big fan of lengthy description but her style does not repel me. The Emperor's Children I think was better written but The Last Life holds its own too. This book gave me a lot of insights into identity - who a person is and what makes that person - and choice.

The quality of the writing kept me reading this book. It is written like a memoir, and when the narrator, Sagesse, is relating her own life and experiences, there is life in the novel. Where it loses heart is in the back and forth stories of different generations that are often dry and boring.

Claire Messud’s novel The Last Life was published in 1999. Just a few years later, I discovered the book at Casa del Libro on Barcelona’s Paseo de Gracia. I was preparing to fly home for Christmas and there it was, a fat paperback on the books-in-English table.
Turns out I had made a good choice. I read the novel straight through on the first leg of my trip—from Barcelona to JFK. The prose was splendid, lucid, at times luminous. I’d chosen a brutal, compulsively readable novel.
The Last Life tells the story of three generations of the LaBasse family through the eyes of adolescent Sagesse, the daughter of a Frenchman born in Algeria and an American woman. We know, from the opening sentence, that Sagesse ends up in America, but her story begins on the Mediterranean coast, in a less than glamourous beach town where her grandfather owns and runs the Bellevue, an ice-cream colored hotel built into the cliffs overlooking the sea. The grandfather, old now, and cantankerous, built the hotel in the late fifties, not only as a business, but as an escape route, a ladder of sorts, when he knew his family would be forced out of Algeria, where they had lived, and the French had ruled, brutally, for several generations.
What Messud, also the daughter of a Frenchman born in Algeria, does so well is describe the intimate trauma of colonization, the pain passed down through generations not only of the colonized, but in this case, of the colonizers. In this way, with its intricate portrait of racism and European supremacy in the domestic sphere, the book brings to mind Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream. The violence described is quotidian, familiar, it occurs in bakeries and in living rooms, between housewives and their maids, husbands and wives, parents and children, parents and other people’s children. Messud’s interest, like Smith’s, lies in the smaller tragedies, the tearing apart of tender, childhood relationships, so common in segregated societies. Sagesse frames her summers of night swimming and awkward teenage sexual encounters within the fragility of provincial societies, far away from the metropole. Through the eyes of a smart, slightly detached, adolescent, we get a glimpse of all the awfulness carried out behind closed doors, of the brutality simmering beneath the dining- room table during each and every three-course meal.
Messud traces minor trespasses of her protagonist’s ancestors—sleeping with a maid, philandering with townies—against the backdrop of a collective trauma, of colonization, war, terror and torture, and by the late 1980s, the steady rise of the National Front in France. Simultaneously she tells a classic coming-of-age story, in which Sagesse is embarrassed by her timid, American-born mother, protective of her younger brother, and bothered by a nasty case of back acne. In the span of just one summer, a deadly bombing shocks the town, the embittered grandfather shoots a hotel guest, and a WASP named Chad takes a liking to Sagesse.
In The Last Life we also see Messud in a sort of adolescence of her career, a stage of hers I happen to adore. There are, for sure, some over-the-top descriptions of foods, faces, and furniture:
blushing mounds of peaches alongside plump and purple eggplants, exuberant fronded skirts of frissé salads cozying next to succulent crimson cherries, pale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar-speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African dates.


It almost gets embarrassing! But we also get lighter strokes, sharper moments, a perfect slice of very real emotion. I’ll never forget this depiction of the gentle, ever-so delicate relationship between mother and teenage girl:
(Mother) “Save Friday for me.” (Sagesse) “How come?”
(Mother) “Market downtown. I thought we might stop by the parfumerie and pick out a couple of lipsticks, one each, for the season.”
Sagesse still loves going to the market with her mother, a prim American woman who has ended up in a forgotten part of Europe, in a “town, long waning in significance, ugly duckling of the Mediterranean coast” just too far from Nice and too close to Marseille. Here, the market is like downtown in a bigger city—the heart of the place, where everyone goes to see and be seen.
Such sleepy towns in the south of France have become spectral reminders of France’s failings in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Booming in their heyday, such resorts came to represent high unemployment, the rise of far-right parties, and made clear the country’s increasingly obvious inability to move forward as a multi-ethnic, racially diverse society. In 1989, the year in which The Last Life takes place, all these phantoms of the past—
the failures of colonialism and a sluggish, centralized state—were beginning to appear and the National Front began to gain support in downtrodden towns. Carol, Sagesse’s mother ends up there, because she too, we are given to understand, like her pied-noir in-laws is provincial, from the peripheries, not worldly.
Carol, raised Catholic, (thank, Christ her mother-in-law must think) hails from rural Massachusetts. Her parents long dead, her home long forgotten, she tries to fit into to a provincial culture, to hide, or perhaps wholly erase herself. She is strangely oblivious to the political tensions simmering in the town, quite shocked when a women in the market accuses
her of being “with them,” meaning with the National Front. She is almost a person without a past or any sort of history, and certainly without a voice or her own opinions:
Small and neat, my mother had done her best to impersonate a Frenchwoman: her dark hair was pulled back in a tiny chignon, her blouses and skirts were cut in the latest fashion, and she favored trim, navy cardigans that pointed up the slimness of her shoulders. But something in her face, in the shape of her head, or the way she held it, gave away her foreignness. Perhaps it was simple anxiety; my mother was constantly anxious. But the result was the inability to take command.
Carol, who made the amateur mistake of marrying the first handsome man who paid her any attention, is trapped by her nasty in-laws and her husband—now pudgy and stern— but primarily, and most tragically, she is trapped by her son, Etienne. Sagesse explains, “The doctors, almost immediately, pronounced him incapable of motor coordination and severely mentally retarded: little more than a vegetable, by the reckoning of the world. For my parents, this was the clanging of their prison door.” With the arrival of Etienne, Carol is imprisoned in provincial France, forever at the mercy of her husband’s family, their money, their rituals and customs.
Etienne, who is present in many of the most pivotal scenes of the book, allows the reader to see Sagesse most clearly as a teenager—that in-between place of innocence and bold truth telling. Silent, yet ever-present, Etienne acts as a portal, allowing Sagesse to see adults. She is fiercely protective of her brother and discovers other’s (im)morality through their reactions to and treatment of him. Messud’s novel suggests that the way we treat the weakest and most vulnerable is key to our core, a sort of litmus test for common decency. The Last Life shows just how cruel we can be—as parents, as neighbors, as guests in a foreign land.
For the most part, I’ve found Messud’s later, much more talked-about books, less complex, and not nearly as captivating as The Last Life. The Emperor’s Children, published in 2006, felt stilted to me— the characters, not only unlikeable, but cartoonish and silly. The use of September 11th, 2001 as a culminating, emotional force falls flat. The New York Messud gave us in The Emperor’s Children felt fake, whereas each place Messud describes in The Last Life—Algiers, the Hotel Bellevue, a postwar Paris, Cape Cod—shimmers. There is an exactitude in her descriptions that creates an arc, the precise and particular line of a life, of someone’s lived and imagined memories. Perhaps that is why in the quieter, seemingly less ambitious Life, Messud narrates individual tragedy within and around geopolitics almost seamlessly.
Sagesse escapes her childhood home, ending up in New York, where she pretends to be another kind of other. She tells the men she sleeps with that she is Venezuelan or Argentine, an explanation for a slight accent and dark hair. But, Messud reminds us, we are never safe from the past or very far beyond our family’s sins. In New York, twenty- something Sagesse, is still haunted by two voiceless men: her own brother Etienne and her father’s illegitimate brother, Hamed. Home, the novel reminds us, is ever shifting, an in- between place, shaped at once by our longing for it and our rejection of it.
Perhaps I read The Last Life at the perfect moment, on a flight towards home. At the time I lived in a provincial part of Europe, not far from Marseille, and was doing my best to fit in, to erase much of myself. Sagesse’s France, in its simple and sharp cruelty, felt very close to my own everyday at the time.
For the last leg of that trip I didn’t have anything to read. It was a short journey, just a 45-minute flight from JFK to Baltimore. But we had bad weather—strong wind, freezing rain and then spectacular lightening and a very rough patch of turbulence. When the small plane dropped quite suddenly, the man next to me reached for my hand. He was big, burly, but had cool hands with slender fingers and manicured nails. Once the plane steadied we introduced ourselves. He had been visiting his parents in Istanbul, and was returning home to Baltimore.


We talked about Turkey, about snowstorms, about holiday plans. Then we were silent until we had landed safely and he asked me, “Do you feel like this is home?”
I paused.
But he answered his own question.
“Once you leave,” he said. “You’re never home, just always in-between.” That is of course the absolute truth and it’s a story worth exploring from many
perspectives, one worth telling over and over again. The Last Life, with elegance and verve, does exactly that.

The verbose style and the too intricate structure make this a laboured read. The characters are also not engaging.

This book is enriched with the tales of growing up in a Patriachal family and the oppression this brings on a families life. I thought it floundered towards the end but a deep and meaningful coming of age novel.

Claire Messud is a beautiful writer so it pains me to say I did not enjoy The Last Life. Maybe it is because this is outside of my usual genre but I was very bored during this read. I love the fact that Claire was weaving the histories of many different generations into what could have been a very inspiring story, but I found myself skimming chapters and even skipping some all together because I just couldn't get into it.
I gave two stars because you can't ignore her talent and I think if she worked on a story with an interesting plot line Claire could be phenomenal.

I stuck with this book through to the end (though I barely skimmed the last 20%) because I have great respect for thr author's talent. I found almost everything about this book to be screamingly, frustratingly unpleasant. I very much wanted to be interested in the subplot about the dissolution of French Algeria, the theme of which feels very relevant today. The characters were all unlikeable. The narrator was a navel-gazing teenager and my god she navel-gazed. Age appropriate, perhaps, but there is a reason I don't hang out with teenagers and in my limited reading time I am angry that I gave Sagesse so much of my headspace. Perhaps this book would speak better to a 17 year old grappling with ideas of identity and family in an insufferably self-important way . 20 years past that point in my life, I wanted anything to hook onto with my adult brain. Some scrap of humor would have been nice but there was a startling lack of any semblance anywhere in these pages. I endured this book, and I feel faintly beaten up by it. The editor who took this to press without crossing out fully 2/3rds of the adjectives should be fired. There is no, and I mean absolutely fucking zero reason to use "inundating chevalure" to describe "hair," let alone TWICE IN THREE PAGES. I am thoroughly disgusted with modern lit right now. Just- god. Give me a minute. I can't even.

I don't know if three stars reflects how much I actually enjoyed this book (truly, a lot!), but it didn't seem powerful enough to grant a fourth star. Other reviewers mentioned the overly complex language for a teenager, which I think is an unfair criticism that misses the magic of this book. Messud's narrator is the protagonist's adult (and, yes, tedious) self who inserts herself throughout the novel. I thought the language was perfect for an adult reader. It evokes the memories of feeling so special and smart and articulate as a know-it-all teenager. Messud captures the malaise and arrogance of adolescence fantastically and so accessibly for adults that it makes the grown-up me cringe! *Of course* Messud's narrator read Camus when she was 14.

The story of post-colonial Algeria and France is interesting and captures the complicated processes of navigating imperial heritage. I thought there could have maybe been more done with the mother's American connection, politically. But perhaps that was part of the point, and it could have come off as a bit overwrought.

It's a very good book, and does feel particularly timely despite its 1999 publication.