Perhaps the single most boring book I’ve ever read. No part of it interested me. And the device of slipping back in time to tell stories that affected decisions in the present was overdone and a waste of words in every instance.

3.5.

this one read like messud was trying on a proustian sweatshirt. messud's prose, in her other books i've read, wasn't nearly this languorous, this—to its mild detriment—meandering.

Elegiac would be a cliched way to describe the coming of age narrative. The story is deceptively simple on its surface, but beneath the description of a teenaged girl's seemingly innocent summer experiences lies a philosophical depth. Messud wraps the girl's tale within the story of three generations of a Pied-Noir family, their experiences in Algeria and in metropolitan France, and adds just a touch of literary history by examining St. Augustine and Albert Camus.

Messud, much like DeLillo, somehow in the 90s looked forward to our age of terrorism and multicultural conflict and describes what would come. He narrative includes hints of anti-Muslim sentiment, the rise of new right wing extremists (she mentions Le Pen often) and the truth of what it means to be a refugee in a capitalism sterilized of both memory and meaning.

This work is layered with symbolism, from her brother's isolation to her father's death, and examined in the context of Camus and Augustine and their conflicting conclusions regarding the value of struggle.

The criticisms of the book's languid and "boring" pace are understandable, but anyone with a love of the Mediterranean, knowledge of Camus' Algeria or an interest in lyrical prose will find Messud's descriptive and sentence-level craft a distinct pleasure.

I could not finish this book. While the beginning of the book drew me in with the proper language and literary writing, I quickly became bogged down in the familial descriptions, locations, actions, and thoughts. Everything seemed to be following little veiny threads from what I began to think the book would lead and the threads would just disappear over the edges of the pages never to be picked up again.
Halfway through the book, I still was unsure of its purpose outside of the telling of a rather piece quilt of slightly interesting histories and lives that only seem to have one person in common and not much else.