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.

This was a very sad book and not until the last 100 pages did I really appreciate the story. The writing was very beautiful and tender but I felt somewhat removed from their lives and pain while reading. So cannot say much more about it than that. It felt distant and wary and maybe that was her objective.

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.

The verbose style and the too intricate structure make this a laboured read. The characters are also not engaging.

I don't know if three stars reflects how much I actually enjoyed this book (truly, a lot!), but it didn't seem powerful enough to grant a fourth star. Other reviewers mentioned the overly complex language for a teenager, which I think is an unfair criticism that misses the magic of this book. Messud's narrator is the protagonist's adult (and, yes, tedious) self who inserts herself throughout the novel. I thought the language was perfect for an adult reader. It evokes the memories of feeling so special and smart and articulate as a know-it-all teenager. Messud captures the malaise and arrogance of adolescence fantastically and so accessibly for adults that it makes the grown-up me cringe! *Of course* Messud's narrator read Camus when she was 14.

The story of post-colonial Algeria and France is interesting and captures the complicated processes of navigating imperial heritage. I thought there could have maybe been more done with the mother's American connection, politically. But perhaps that was part of the point, and it could have come off as a bit overwrought.

It's a very good book, and does feel particularly timely despite its 1999 publication.

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.

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.

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

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.

Couldn't wait to finish it so I could read something enjoyable! Verbose and depressing.

I'm very mixed on this book. The writing is beautiful, but the sections where she delved deeper into philosophy were exhausting. Something about the structure of the story, too, made it hard for me to remember the plot and characters each time I picked it up. It kept me interested, but at the same time I was happy to finish it.

The quality of the writing kept me reading this book. It is written like a memoir, and when the narrator, Sagesse, is relating her own life and experiences, there is life in the novel. Where it loses heart is in the back and forth stories of different generations that are often dry and boring.