So far, I am not that impressed. Messud shows a lot of skills, but her over-the-top prose (with many words you only come across when studying for your GREs) seems ill-fitting when writing from the perspective of a teenage girl. I find it hard to connect to the protagonist, and now at page 285, I have stopped caring to know anymore.
One of the few books I have abandoned.

I really liked Messud’s style. She challenges the reader to contemplate and discover what we have in common, like Augustine and Camus. A coming of age story that takes place primarily on the French Mediterranean coast. Algeria is always in view, and when it isn’t, there is the watercolour painting of the harbor, that if the heroine looks at long enough she just may enter it’s reality. Messud likes to share philosophy and politics but in palatable amounts. Neither overwhelms the reader or distracts from the narrative of a young woman’s story. Her story is also the story of her paternal grandparents, her parents, and her maternal relatives in America - the land of containers and styrofoam. Her grappling with her identity is told in 10 parts, each part a story in itself. An absorbing and, at times, mesmerizing read.

Messud is an author whose writing I greatly admire. Over the last few years, I have slowly been making my way through her back catalogue, and have thoroughly enjoyed each of her books. Messud, as an author, appears to me to be rather underrated. I rarely see reviews of her work unless I seek them out, and one of my absolute favourites amongst her novels - The Emperor's Children - seems polarising among readers.

One thing which I love about Messud's work is that each of her books is so different in subject matter. Everything which she writes about, from an obsessive female friendship in The Woman Upstairs, to a complicated relationship between two sisters living on opposite sides of the world in When the World Was Steady, is utterly compelling. The Last Life, her second novel, was published in 1999, and is certainly a book to savour.

The Last Life takes as its focus a fifteen-year-old girl named Sagesse LaBasse, who tells her story with a 'ruthless regard for truth'. She comes from a family of French Algerian immigrants who own a hotel, the Bellevue, on the French Riviera. This overlooks their old homeland. The family are 'haunted by their history' and, early on in the novel, they are 'brought to the brink of destruction by a single reckless act.'

Sagesse has an American mother, and muses throughout about her heritage, and what her mixed nationalities mean to her. The novel is told from a position of retrospect, from Sagesse's apartment in New York City; it opens: 'I am American now, but this wasn't always so.' A couple of paragraphs later, she reveals the following: 'I'm not American by default. It's a choice. But it is a mask. Who, in the thronged avenues of Manhattan, hasn't known this?' The grown Sagesse has reached a point in her life where she wishes to 'translate the world inside, beginning with the home that was once mine, on France's southern coast...'. So begins her story.

From the outset, everything about The Last Life intrigued me. Messud's prose is rich, and characteristically searching. The many descriptions which she gives throughout to situate Sagesse and her family are luscious, and incredibly evocative. Messud's attention to detail renders every landscape, every object, almost tangible to the reader. When living in the South of France, for instance, '... the days lingered like overripe fruit, soft and heavily scented, melting into the glorious dusk. We gathered by the hotel pool, on the clifftop, after supper, watching the sky falter into Prussian blue, to blue-black, and the moon rise over the Mediterranean, the sea spread out before us, whispering and wrinkled.'

In many ways, The Last Life is a coming-of-age novel; we watch the teenage Sagesse grow, preoccupied with stuffing her bra, and being around her peers rather than her family. There are moments of intrigue here, and others of surprise. The single incident, which serves to make the LaBasse family question so much, felt unexpected, as did Sagesse's expulsion from the family home soon afterward, to stay with her aunt in America. Messud demonstrates great insight throughout, especially on the many and varied experiences of being a teenager. I found Sagesse and her reactions to be thoroughly believable.

The storyline of The Last Life is an intricate one. The feelings of displacement, of 'otherness', ricochet through the novel, affecting many of the characters. When with her aunt in Boston, Sagesse comments: 'It dawned on me in those early days that I was, in this place, remarkably, a cipher. I didn't speak much. The tidal wave of American English was tiring for me, and it took all my energy to keep up, and anyway I felt that my personality didn't translate. I couldn't make jokes in English, or not without planning them out before I spoke, by which time they ceased to be funny and I couldn't be bothered to voice them... But because they didn't know me, my cousins didn't notice. They thought me reserved, perhaps, or pensive, or homesick (which I often was, but they didn't ask about my home), and each projected onto me the character she wanted or needed me to have.'

I have always found Messud's work to contain incredibly deep portrayals and explorations of the human condition. This novel is certainly no different; it is just as astute, direct, and thorough as I was expecting. I cannot fathom why Messud seems to be such an underappreciated author, and I hope that if you pick up The Last Life, or one of her books based on this review, that you enjoy her work just as much as I do.

This is a beautifully written, layered and complicated novel. I found it slow going but totally worth the effort.

I found little to like about this book. The story is depressing, the writing style and use of language distracting, and not one of the characters likable. It took me forever to read, I kept hoping something redeemable would happen, I was disappointed all the way to the final page.

This is a coming of age story with a twist. A young French girl, Sagesse, is trying to figure out her place in the world. She is torn between an American mother and a French father (who was forced to leave his beloved Algeria as a young adult). She navigates adolescence in a quagmire of a family that is bound together by their untethered roots. Sometimes I was put off with the self-absorbed nature of Sagesse, but then her love of her brother would make me forgive her indulgences and surliness.

One sentiment expressed towards the end of the book spoke profoundly to me. I could identify with and truly appreciate this passage in this time of political uncertainty: "that being American was simple: “The one requirement,” she sniffed, “and there is only one—but one I cannot bear—is that you believe in America, that you believe it is the best place.” I believe, at least, that it is real, and that I am here. But I have taken her at her word: I would not ever openly profess disbelief, and that, thus far, has been enough. In other regions, out in the country’s vast wavering plains and valleys that I do not know, I worry that my disguise would be blown from me in a strong wind, that I might stand revealed; but I do not venture there, and so have stayed safe. In the city there are millions like me, of all hues and of hidden histories. We keep mum together and are believed. Sufficiently so." For anyone who is trying to find their place in this world and fit in, I think this is quite revealing.

The novel is very well written and the language very rich and descriptive, especially when trying to convey feelings. Where it lacked, was in the development of characters that were actually likeable. I also found the thought processes of Sagesse as a 15 year old were not consistent with how a child of that age would think or understand when explaining the lives and feelings of other characters in the novel.

Whoa. Lot of adjectives. Probably not a great idea to go straight from DeLillo to Messud. But really, who can you read without disappointment after DeLillo?

The never-ending novel. Several good ideas, philosophies, threads, characters, scenes like raisins lost in dough. Maybe it's me, reading it too slowly?

I really ought to give up on Claire Messud. She writes about big issues I am interested in - the fallout from the French leaving Algeria in this book - but somehow deals with them in such a way that I find I care less at the end of the book than I did at the beginning. Contrast the Michael Haneke film Caché, that dealt with the same subject so much more powerfully. I think, perhaps, it's that she doesn't take many risks as a writer, doesn't let the really powerful undercurrents rise up into her prose.

Claire Messud's most recent book, A Strange Eventful History, tells fictionalized stories of her family's lives in "French" Algeria, as does this book, her second novel. The 15 year-old narrator, the daughter of an American mother, and French "pied-noir" father, interlaces their present lives of the French side of the Mediterranean from her family's past in Algeria. I refreshed my recollection of the war for Algerian independence, which helped me understand. It's a long novel--about 570 pages--but a relatively easy read.

"Narrated by Sagesse LaBasse, a young French-American woman with a ruthless regard for truth, The Last Life reveals the secret histories of a household shattered by an inexplicable act of violence. As she unravels her family's carefully spun stories. Sagesse struggles to come to terms with the LaBasses' haunted legacy, and to forge her own future. Moving across generations and continent from colonial Algeria to the south of France to New England, this is a lush and beautifully told novel of lies and ghosts, love and honor. "

I am in shock that more people did not find this book ridiculously boring. Seriously. I had the hardest time caring about any of the characters besides Sagesse and her brother. I cared a little bit about Sagesse's slutty friend, apparently more than she did; a bit about her summer paramour, again, apparently more than she did; her American cousins, see above. That the more engaging characters just sort of drifted out of the story really frustrated me, even though I know the book wasn't about them. I suppose, since the book was technically about the LaBasse family, I should have appreciated those characters a bit more, but the grandmother's stories? UNBELIEVABLY TEDIOUS.