I loved this book. Really fascinating to understand, in part, the life of a family of “pieds noirs” (French citizens who colonialized Algeria
to begin a farm or business and were then forced to return to France because of revolution).

Really depressing and I didn't like her writing. I got so I would read the first line of paragraphs and skip to the next just to move the book along. I read it to help learn about French/Algerian history, which I did, but I just didn't like the book.

Messud is a good storyteller and creates intriguing characters. The plot however is not all that compelling and the jumping back and forth between time periods does not help. Overall this is a good relatable tale about family history & secrets, and how we choose to distance and/or recreate ourselves from them. A bit of knowledge of France's colonization of Algeria is helpful to put the story in context.

Gorgeously written coming of age story of Sagesse, a young girl who is descended from the pied-noir French colonialists in Algeria. This book is sad and dark and thought-provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed the settings of Algeria and Marseilles, and watching the revelation of the La Basse family’s secrets against the backdrop of their hotel on the Mediterranean was captivating. Negative reviews of The Last Life claim that Messud’s vocabulary and allusions (like to Albert Camus) were too sophisticated for a 14-year old girl, but I thoroughly disagree, as Sagesse is of a wealthy, educated, and sophisticated old money family in France. Besides, Camus was a pied-noir and the protagonist identifies with him and is writing about him for a school project, which is completely plausible. Early in the book, after reading Messud’s description of the produce in the bustling open air market, I fell in love with her writing and had trouble putting the book down, which is why I finished it in only 2 days.

Epic, deep, engaging, multi-layered, and beautifully written. I spent a lovely week with this book.

This was a lot a lot like “The Lying Life of Adults” (which is a lot a lot like “My Brilliant Friend”), and also like "Atonement," with a bit of "Children's Bible" wafting in here and there (although noticeably more European than American). It's a book about loss and disillusionment and coming to terms with unfortunate realities—histories, presents, and futures. If you like watching angst develop in real time in teenaged girls trying to figure out how the world works, this is one to try. It's complicated and imperfect and uncomfortable, and it contains more questions than answers, and I'm not sure if I *liked* it as much as I appreciated it (although I appreciated it a whole lot; the author has a fascinating mind), and I can't think of any specific person I'd recommend this to, but maybe you'll like or appreciate it too?

Here are some killer vocab words, followed by some quotes that capture the big-smallness/close-vastness of the book's arc:

cicatrise: to heal by scar formation
bibelots: small, decorative ornaments or trinkets
pullulate: multiply or spread prolifically or rapidly, or to be full of or teeming with
chevelure: head of hair
soughing: making a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound, as of the sea
shantung: a type of silk weave fabric
estival: belonging to or appearing in summer
tentacular: equipped with tentacles
medusa (adj): like a free-swimming sexual form of a coelenterate such as a jellyfish
marabout: a shrine marking the burial place of a Muslim holy man or hermit
nacreous: having a play of lustrous rainbow colors, like mother-of-pearl
flense: to slice the skin or fat from a carcass
abscission: the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit

"But fourteen is not an age a which you ask outright for answers: not yet. Those in-between years are a haze of second-guessing and dialogues entirely of the mind. The possibility of human proximity seems greater than it ever will again, trailing still the unreflective clouds of childhood, the intimate, unsentenced dialogue of laughter or of games. Children do not have the words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood. // Adolescence, then is a curious station on the route from ignorant communion to our ultimate isolation, the place where words and silences reveal themselves to be meaningful and yet where, too young to acknowledge that we cannot gauge their meaning, we imagine it for ourselves and behave. Only with the passage of years, wearied, do we resort to asking. With the inadequacy of asking and the inadequacy of replies comes the realization that what we thought we understood bears no relation to what exists, the way, seeing the film of a book we have read, we are aghast to find the heroine a strapping blonde when we had pictured her all these years a small brunette; and her house, which we envisaged so clearly and quaintly on the edge of a purple moor, a vast, unfamiliar pile of rubble with all its rooms out of order."

"When you are fourteen—or fifteen, or sixteen—none of it on such a morning after seems at all possible....Blithley to say it seems unreal is not to capture the complexity of the state: what has come before hovers like a dream, and what is yet to come is unimaginable. The future stretches far to the horizon, but between now and it a chasm has opened, for which no possible bridge can be seen. This was my second encounter with such rupture, and already I was learning that such times, when all that was fixed is suddenly inchoate, are perhaps more real than any other: the passage of time inflicts itself in each ticking of the clock, the light is brighter, the outlines of objects painfully distinct. And mixed with fear and dismay lies an undeniable, glittering anticipation, a detached curiosity: something must happen that I cannot foresee; none will come, and evening, and tomorrow; that bridge from here to there must be built and must be crossed, and when I turn back from the other side, the very chasm will have closed up as if it had never been."

"I wanted, really, to write an essay about what it was like to be penned into a corner where every choice was wrong, where nobody would trust you and where the truth could not be told because it didn't exist. Camus knew it, and in my little way I knew it too. We all knew it, in my house, but we didn't talk about it."

"Words, meaningless though they might ring, as wrongly as we may interpret them, are the only missiles with which we are equipped, which we can lob across the uncharted terrain between our souls."

"I was asked why I had done it [jumped into a fountain at age four]. I announced—and it was true; I remember precisely the instant of teetering—that, aware I was going to fall willy-nilly, I had assumed my fate by making it my intention. What I actually said was simpler, of course: 'I was falling, so I jumped.' // Already at four, from somewhere, I had faith in intention—as if the fact that it had been willed altered the quality of my wetness, and the cold that ensued....And that, always, was the lesson of my family's stories....The implication was clear. Severance, departure, once mooted, must be seen as inevitable: that has always been my unquestioned belief. If choice is illusory, the aim must be to keep the illusion intact. With this corollary: there is no returning. We need the might-have-been because we know it will not ever be; the imaginary is our sustenance, but the real is where we live, a reality of fragments. We move the pieces when movement is possible, because possibility and necessity, on some plane, are one; because what is fated and what will be are inescapably the same, and the illusion our only choice, choice our illusion."

On death: "Even now, when I lock myself out of my apartment, and yet can see, in my mind, the exact position of my keys on the kitchen counter, ready to be snatched up—I cannot quite accept that those keys are inaccessible to me, that in the instant in which I slammed the door they became irretrievably, unsalvageable distant, on the other side, in the might-have-been, the ought-to-have-been; and it is only belatedly and with greater reluctance that I summon the super, or the locksmith—depending on the hour—admitting thereby that I cannot will the keys—and yet I see them, so exactly, and can feel their slippery coldness, their jagged runs—into my present pocket; that my error cannot be undone."

I really enjoyed this book about several generations of a family forced to flee Algeria and relocate to France. Told from the perspective of a 15 year old girl, it explores her family's many secrets, and her own identity as part French, part American, and part French Algerian, and the struggles of holding a family together in the face of tragedy and controversy.

perfect book on the endless personal and collective repercussions of reckless colonial gestures. i found the beautiful but elaborate language a little tiresome. the characters are not entirely sympathetic, which is of course the point, and brave on the part of the author, yet that, too, drew away from my pleasure in reading this book. it is, however, a truly valuable and beautiful book, and and it deserves a higher rating than than the subjective one i gave it.

This was the first, but won't be the last, Messud book I read. A beautiful writer, she expertly creates characters with deep personalities and backstories. Slow to unravel, and gently looping through time and various characters' stories, the novel took, and deserved, time to explore its intricacies and language. I frequently say the stories of "the old person remembering life" are lazily written and terribly structured, and The Last Life is evidence to support my belief. Messud moves seamlessly through generations, weaving stories, echoing histories and creating new ones. The reader learns of generations of stories, woven through time, organically. In this time of 'stay-at-home' life, this novel was a treasure to savor.

Not a novel. More a memoire or diary, told in the first person with perfect, total, incredible recall, purportedly told from a decade or more in the future. Even to the recounting of the lives of her parents and grandparents. Little descriptive action, scene setting, or plot building. Obviously well written with all the bells and whistles, but lacking any building of emotion or excitement. Further, I never found a character that I was attracted to or even interested in. The narrator and her story were interesting enough to carry the book, but not ultimately exemplary or appealing.

I enjoyed this moving and illuminating literary novel, The Last Life, by Claire Messud. It focuses on French Algerian emigrants, the LaBasse family living in Colonial Algeria, the south of France, and NewEngland. I learned so much from this interesting story told through the voice of the 14 year old daughter....Messud nails her so well. Messud must have teenagers or recent teens or just knows them deeply. She shows us the moody, flippant, egocentric, full-of-angst teenager, coming of age in many ways and desires. Through her voice we learn about her imperfect parents and grandparents (hotel owners), and her friends and cousins. We learn also about many lies and deceptions in a directly, roundabout way.

I listened to this on Audiobook and the narrator Saskia Maarleveld, as usual, is great.

If you’re looking for a rich, multileveled story, with viewpoints of 3 different generations, this is for you. I enjoyed learning more about the French Algerians history, and I always enjoy a good novel set in France and New England. Parts of this novel are marvelous and so beautifully written, that I could have reread it. I also found that some other parts dragged a bit and, since it's a lengthy novel...it was tedious, but don't let that deter you because the "golden gems" of her writing are just that.

Publisher's Blurb: It features the "LaBasse family, whose quiet integrity is shattered by the shots from a grandfather's rifle. As their world suddenly begins to crumble, long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before he was even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed, a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue--the family business--to its knees. Messud skillfully and inexorably describes how the stories we tell ourselves, and the lies to which we cling, can turn on us in a moment."

The Last Life was movingly written; not happy, but deeply affecting. The last third of the book was the best, as the protagonist reflects on what has happened and the personalities and motivations of family members driving the story's action.

For me as a young middle-aged adult, the book raised a lot of interesting -- sometimes painful, but also hopeful -- questions about identity, choice, 'starting fresh,' and many other issues. Sagesse, the narrator, did a beautiful job of communicating the (often frustrated) desire to have others 'do what they say they're going to do, and be whole.'

I was also struck by the truths, which many of us in our independence-minded society are loathe to admit, that 'freedom is a terrible thing...,' that 'we long to be sentenced,' and that 'our constrictions define us.' Lots of food for thought and feeling here.