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.

What I enjoyed - themes related to colonialism, family, belonging, otherness.
What I did not enjoy- overly descriptive prose, Sargesse, the main character, lacked insight throughout, even as she aged into adulthood. Too much foreshadowing!

Finally, Sargesse's relationship with Etienne, her disabled brother, was gross and her thoughts about him and actions toward him seemed to be included purely for shock. I do not believe a girl, herself a virgin, would casually give her disabled brother a hand job. Her relationship to her mother is also puzzling.

Messud returns repeatedly to the idea that Etienne, in his passive existence somehow represents everyone, but quite clearly through all the choices every other character has the agency to make, that is not true.

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.

A very well-written, largely unoriginal novel with tier one protagonist development. Messud can write, no doubt, the pages in Algeria are terrific and the trials of the family's daughter - not quite belonging to any culture or friend group, estrangement from her family, etc., are fully realized. The missteps are common to these kinds of novels - America does not exist outside New England, indigenous rights groups in Europe are evil (but treating Arabs like a servant class is totally cool), the teenagers are oversexed and there's infidelity and random incest - so edgy. These cringe-worthy components notwithstanding, the narrative is strong, the characters are interesting, and the scenes well-wrought. I'm glad I read this.

An interesting journey with a young girl as she develops into a young lady. The trials and tribulations of a family and how it affects her adolescents. She believes at first it started with one gunshot but as she looks deeper into her families past she realizes that the in fact the sequences of events started many,many years ago. Good read.

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).

Not my favorite writing style; far too many run on sentences and commas to describe every little thing. Nearly every sentence had 3 + commas!

Aside from that, the story was dreadfully boring.

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

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.

Racism, sexism, classism, adolescence, family, disability, national identity vs. personal identity, infidelity, and history. Oh my! Most of all, though, loneliness.

Wonderfully written.

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).

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.