Well written book, but not a happy book.

Thank you Sophia @the_unwined for this free book from your giveaway!
“The Last Life” by Claire Messud ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Genre: Historical Fiction/Coming of Age. Location: Colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England, USA. Time: 1950s-1991.

This is the story of 3 generations of the secretive French-Algerian LaBasse family, narrated by 15-year-old Sagesse LaBasse. In the 1950s, Jacques LaBasse (Sagesse’s grandfather) moved the family from Algiers to France when he realized French colonization days were numbered. He built the Hotel Bellevue on the French Mediterranean, and ruled it with the same tyrannical authority he used on his family. When Sagasse is 15, her grandfather shoots a teenager. Shattered by this, the family begins to unravel. Secrets are revealed: a son abandoned before birth, a mother with a hidden identity, a father who brings the family business to its knees.

Author Messud has Sagesse tell her story from 2 perspectives: her 15-year-old self, and her older self looking backwards with sadness and knowledge. She sympathetically describes Sagesse's efforts to come to terms with her past, and to build a new sense of self. Messud reminds us of the need people have to create personal and public stories-and how the stories and lies we tell ourselves can turn on us in a moment. It’s a emotional and philosophical look at an isolated, exiled family as it disintegrates, and it’s 4 stars from me

I loved, loved, loved this book! A teenage French girl narrating her and her family's stories. It's about family dynamics, it's about longing for a country that's lost to you forever, it's about the agonies of adolescence in a particular place and time, about how loved ones communicate -- or more often don't. I didn't particularly care for Messud's "The Emporer's Children," but this one is excellent. Now that I think of it, both books dealt with domineering patriarchal figures.

Evocative writing that didn’t capture me. The present kept presaging the future but I’m not sure I got the point of what was being anticipated.

I’m on the fence on this one. I could never fully connect with any of the characters for any length of time and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Maybe that was the point; each had their moments before being fractured as people, or fractured within the family unit. The scene in Algeria is one that will stay with me for a very long time.

So there you have it, the character of the father who is the most distasteful of all at the end is the most endearing in his youth with regards to his grandmother. The passing of the watercolor was also beautiful.

Paraphrasing a bit, my favorite passage is in regard to the debasement of the French Culture. “What motivates good behavior and what motivates excellence is the same thing. Fear of God, fear of the rod, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of pain and in our society no one is afraid of anything. “

I guess there is much to take away from this book opening a discussion on many topics. It has sent me in search of books about the French in Algeria.

I slogged through the first 2/3 - the meandering, vapid teen angst, oblivious to life outside her limited sight. Not a bildungsroman. Some odd uses of words - like they were just tossed in after a dictionary search. Word salad. A good editor was needed to get the book on track.
Interspersed were paragraphs, pages of insight and glimmers of what the book was really about - our past and its haunting. influence. importance.
The last third was the book it should have been throughout. Thoughtful, interesting, struggling with identity and loss and a society that I knew little about (save for Camus) the pieds noir, French colonialism and the ensuing war in Algeria.

Could NOT wait to get this one over with! Ugh!

This is the first of Claire Messud's work I have read, but I liked it, and will read more by her. The pacing of the story is good, character development isn't extraordinary, but is satisfactory: I can't say I really got to know Sagesse all that well. It's not clear she knows herself, either, as evidenced by the varied origins she gives herself at her boarding school. Even at the end of the book she is searching. I think I understand her grandparents better, as unlikable as they are, and her brother was well drawn and recognizable to me from my experience working in a home for severely developmentally disabled people as a young adult.
I kind of feel the events in the book that shape the individuals: her father's history and his family's lives in Algeria, the sense of dislocation throughout the book, the grandfather's act of violence, etc., do not adequately explain the pathos of the book, though hidden secrets affecting a family's relationships in later years is a lesson to be learned from it. The two things in Sagesse's life that do explain her estrangement from her family more immediately (her brother's birth and her father's death) are most important to the narrative I think, and drive the action.
All in all a pleasant read. I like Messud's prose style and word choices. I don't really know how the title fits, or what it means...

Family history is never singular. Messud captures the multiplicities of family narrative. What are our defining moments? How do we construct and rewrite what is and was important in our lives – and those of our ancestors? Partially a coming of age story for a young French girl of Pied Noir heritage and part an ode to lost homelands. I love novels with this kind of strikingly beautiful prose, that require rereading a sentence four times, but still plow through the 400 pages in a few days. Her timeline lingers and returns to seemingly trivial parts that are important and glazes over others as do our memories.

It was ambitious, she tackled a lot of themes here. I liked how the structure, telling an event than circling back to it to give you an understanding of why. Wish I knew more about French Algiers, thought the relationships between the families interesting. There was a section where she talked about being rooted and held both willing and unwilling that was really insightful.

I will say I don’t have a ~sophisticated~ taste in books. I’ve loved her other books but I could not get into this one. Nothing pulled me in. The subplot was kind of confusing especially with the back and forth and different times in history. I finished it but was hardly taking anything in I was so bored.

I've never been a fan of philosophy, and tend to find French writers to be philosophical. Claire Messud is a philosophical French writer. The Last Life was both sprawling and fragmented, and if I were more interested in the main character's story it would've been easier to follow.

Sagesse is a French teenager. Her father is Algerian, her mother American, and her younger brother Etienne suffered brain damage at birth and is wheelchair bound. The family business is the Bellevue Hotel Sagesse's grandfather built and runs. Sagesse and her bratty pack of teenager friends (some tourists, some children of hotel employees) commandeer the hotel pool every evening, making a general nuisance of themselves until one night the grandfather can't take it anymore and comes out and threatens them with a gun. Parts of the book are pre-shooting, some post-shooting; some during the grandfather's youth, some the father's; Sagesse spends a summer with American relatives, she goes to her grandfather's trial, she becomes an American herself - but nothing happens in chronological order.

Albert Camus the philosopher is brought up a lot, he's pied-noir too (French-Algerian).