The Last Life: A Novel

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Amazon.com Review Claire Messud's piercing second novel asks questions most are too fearful to face. Moving between the South of France, the East Coast of the U.S., and Algeria, The Last Life explores the weight of isolation and exile in one French family. Of course, the adjective French is already inadequate, as at least some of the LaBasses still long for the paradise lost of Algeria. And Alex LaBasse's wife, Carol, try as she might with her Continental impersonations, will always be an American sporting a metaphorical twin set. The narrator, Sagesse, too, soon finds herself equally stranded. Only her autocratic grandfather, Jacques, is ostensibly comfortable with the identity he has wrought: successful owner of the Bellevue Hotel and head of his dynasty. It is thanks to this man that 14-year-old Sagesse comes to crave invisibility. Having lost of all of her friends, she sees herself as "a member of the Witness Protection Program, surrounded by an odd human assortment chosen only for the efficiency of disguise; but somehow, nevertheless, inescapable." The cause of this loss? Jacques, fed up with Sagesse and her pals' late-night noise at the hotel pool--or perhaps with their failure to take him seriously--shoots at one girl. This incident ruptures life for each LaBasse, the Bellevue no longer "their bulwark against absurdity." Looking back on the crucial two years following the patriarch's "target practice," Sagesse possesses both a teenager's slant self-interest and an older, acute eye for the mechanisms of shame. The Last Life is that rare thing, a fast-moving philosophical novel masquerading as a bildungsroman. In her efforts at identity and affection, its heroine is increasingly alive to the subterfuges of narrative, forcing herself to sort through versions of reality. Her grandmother, for instance, relates one myth about her husband, only to have Carol undercut it entirely. And Sagesse herself can't figure out whether Jacques is "sentimental or heartless." What if both, she realizes, are possible? As Messud's narrator navigates her way through the past--and the Algerian sections are among the book's most extraordinary--there is everything to savor in her wavelike sentences, many of which possess a dangerously witty undertow. And the scenes of familial tedium are the opposite of tedious. The dialogue snaps with subverted emotion, anxiety, and irony. At one of the LaBasses' bleaker fests, much is made of the mouna , a special (if dry) Algerian cake. Nonetheless, the grandmother does her best to fob it off at evening's end. "I've never cared for it myself, although it's a lovely memory." Retrospect, as Sagesse realizes, is "a light in which we may not see more clearly, but at least have the illusion of doing so." E.M. Forster called another Mediterranean novel, The Leopard , "one of the great lonely books," and it is into this category that The Last Life instantly falls. --Kerry Fried From Publishers Weekly Loss of innocenceAfor a young girl, her family and her nationAis the theme of Messud's resonant second novel. Plangent with the memories of a pivotal two-year period in the life of teenage narrator Sagesse LaBasse, the novel flashes back to three generations of the LaBasse family, pieds noirs who fled Algeria during the 1960s. Domineering patriarch Jacques, Sagesse's grandfather, establishes the Hotel Bellevue on France's Mediterranean coast and proclaims the family myth of invincibility. But the LaBasses suffer from the same vain and empty valuesAoverweening pride and social snobberyAthat led to the French debacle in Algeria. To Sagesse's piously Catholic parents, Alex and Carol, their severely handicapped son, Etienne, is the embodiment of the doctrine of Original Sin, and Carol cares for him at home because LaBasse women must sacrifice themselves for the good of the family. Etienne is also a blow to his parents' marriage, already foundering because of Alex's womanizing and their different cultural backgrounds: Carol is American, and has never been accepted by her stern in-laws. After intolerant, irascible grandp?re shoots at rowdy teenagers on the hotel property, he is sentenced to prison, the LaBasses become social outcasts and Sagesse's friends abandon her. Alex briefly comes into his own and runs the hotel, but Jacques's release accelerates Alex's and the family's destruction. Messud (When the World Was Steady) sustains an elegiac tone in describing a seemingly ordered world that in reality is precarious; the LaBasses erect futile defenses against tragedies they are unable to prevent. In striking scenes, Messud recreates the last days of French rule in Algeria and the anomie of the ex-colonials, exiles from the land they love and strangers in their mother country. Sometimes these frequent flashbacks are awkward and not well integrated into the narrative. Yet some scenesASagesse acting out her adolescent insecurity during a summer with her relatives in New England, for exampleAare small gems. Questions of morality and mortality, of choice or fate or historical destiny, permeate the chronicle, adding coherence to a moving and insightful story. Agent, Georges Borchardt. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Messud's first novel, When the World Was Steady, was a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award; this second work certainly deserves the same kind of treatment. Told by 14-year-old Sagesse LaBasse, it details the destruction of a family of French Algerian emigrants in the south of France. Sagesse is stunned when her grandfather takes a shot at a group of noisy friends at his hotel pool. Other domestic stresses complicate the family's unity: the disabled brother, the philandering father, and the domineering grandmother who had tried to keep the family together with stories from the past. This is a thoughtful, beautifully written novel with well-developed characters and psychological insights. Sagesse is totally believable as a mixed-up teen, and the historical background of the Algerian war for independence from France is accurately depicted. Highly recommended for all public libraries.AAnn Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Silver Spring, MD Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist A young French girl comes of age amid a series of excruciatingly painful family crises. When her grandfather, a prominent hotelier, temporarily loses both his temper and his sanity, firing his rifle at a group of moderately annoying and inconsiderate teenagers, 15-year-old Sagesse LaBasse attempts to make sense of all the circumstances and events that preceded her grandfather's breakdown, her father's suicide, and the disintegration of her predictable existence. Stretching back generations, she unravels her family's complex history and revisits her American and colonial Algerian roots. The deeper she delves, the more she realizes the inescapable fact that the past defines the present, and that the stones she uncovers are often more substantial than her own fragile reality. A spellbinding and perceptive glimpse into a tortured adolescent soul from a tremendously gifted and empathetic writer. Margaret Flanagan From Kirkus Reviews Messud returns (When the World Was Steady, 1995; not reviewed) capably indeed, with an intelligent coming-of-ager about a teenaged girl half-American and halfAlgerian-French. Sagesse LaBasse is 16 in 1991, and here she tells what took place in her life in that crucial girlhood year and in the three or so years before it: and in doing so also limns a painful span in French history, from colonial days in Africa through the battle of Algiersand on to the psychic tolls taken on those who became no longer Algerian and not quite French either. Sagesses grandfather fled Algiers before the collapse, having invested already in land on a semi-barren spot on the Riviera. There he relocated his family, built a hotel, and saw it flourish just as he had foreseen, along with the growing tourist industry. He had always been a rigidly domineering man, however, and success only fed his bitterness at exile, his increasingly rightist demand for what he thought of as social dignity, decorum, and, above all, civic respect and order. So it is that one night when Sagesses friends are using the hotel pool and making a great deal of modern, disrespectful teenage noise, her grandfatherwell, he shoots at them. Wounding a girl, he ends up in court, goes to jail for six monthsand thus exposes the psychic-emotional crack in the LaBasse family that will break it up for good. When that happens, Sagesse will describe it just as bravely and vividly as she does everything elseher own trials through adolescence; her American mothers strange and pale varieties of weakness; the probable feelings of her profoundly retarded brother Etienne (and her own for him); her fathers boyhood, maturation, marriageand finally his utter, wracking, ruinous calamity. A broad canvas, unflinching and clear eye for the truth, and a family tale that never fails to compel and that reverberates universally, as a fine saga should. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review "A beautifully observed portrait." -- Harpers Bazaar "Claire Messud is a deeply interesting young writer." -- Penelope Fitzgerald, Author of The Bookshop and The Blue Flower , Booker Prize winner "Claire Messud is a wonderful writer. In The Last Life she takes on themes of family, history, exoticism and romance, and looks behind the surface to find the difficult ideas lurking in the background. Told through one girl's smart and sensitive voice, it's a story about the dangers and seductions of nostalgia, and the ways in which people do things for the wrong reasons. A dryly funny, deeply felt, serious, ambitious, and beautifully imagined book." -- Jane Mendelsohn, Author of I was Amelia Earhart "Claire Messud's brings an astonishing intelligence to the stories which make the rich tapestry of The Last Life . The novel's power lies in her probing with great immediacy both cultural and generational history. She has written an emotional and moral exploration of exile, of the stories left behind and the stories her characters live. The many voices of the La Basse family--French, Algerian, American--are woven into a narrative of the painful personal revelations and the impermanence of history itself." -- Maureen Howard "Claire Messud, in The Last Life , gives us a fast-moving coming of age novel that provides not only unexpected gunshots, transgressions, betrayals, and family secrets of the kind Francois Mauriac specialized in, but, as well, a subtle anatomy of the aftereffects of the violent decolonization of Algeria on one middle-class ex-colonial family. Characters are unsparingly drawn, and the critical moments in Sagesse LaBasse's loss of innocence are intensely fixed. There are no longueurs. The settings - the French Riviera, Algeria - are richly evoked. You feel the light." -- Norman Rush, Author of Mating "In this rich, resonant, beautifully written novel, Claire Messud brilliantly illuminates the dislocations of body and soul that are the true consequences of exile." -- Andrea Barrett, Author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Ship Fever "Only a writer as intelligent as Claire Messud could have written The Last Life . With its vivid characters, exoticsettings, and deep moral questions, this is an elegant and gripping novel." -- Margot Livesey Claire Messud superbly represents what we mean when we speak of a "born novelist" - her gifts are equal to her ambition. In The Last Life , her remarkable second novel, Messud engulfs the indelibly inscribed LaBasse family in the fortunes of France, Algeria, and America, intertwining the windings and secret caverns of character and history. Imagine Buddenbrooks crossed with A Passage to India ; imagine Camus in a contemporary vein. To open this novel is to sink into a Mediterranean world so urgent and engrossing, so wisely illuminating (and as alive as flesh and Blood), that one regrets arriving at the last page. -- Cynthia Ozick, Author of The Puttermesser Papers About the Author Claire Messud was born in the United States in 1966. She was educated at Yale and Cambridge. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in Washington, D.C. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I am American now, but this wasn't always so. I've been here a long time six years at Columbia alone, and what seems an age before that and have built a fine simulacrum of real life. But in truth, until now I've lived, largely, inside. These small rooms on New York City's Upper West Side are my haven: an ill-lit huddle of books and objects, a vague scent that is home. I've been waiting, although I could not, until he appeared, have given earthly shape to what I waited for. "By pining, we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here: for I sing with my heart, not my flesh." 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? It is the same, for the Korean saleswoman or the Bangladeshi businessman or the Nigerian student, for the Iowan nurse and the Montanan secretary, as it is for me: Americanness draws a veil, it lends a carapace to the lives we hold within. Wherever we have come from, there ceased to be room, or words, or air; only here is breathing possible. The guilt does not evaporate: I live how can I not? With my burden of Original Sin. But in America, at least, where the future is all that binds us, I can seem familiar, new. And for a long time, seeming sufficed. Now I find myself wanting to translate the world inside, beginning with the home that was once mine, on France's southern coast; with the fragrances and echoes of my grandfather's Bellevue Hotel, perched above the vast Mediterranean in its shifting palette of greens and blues and greys; and, as a starting place, with the high season of 1989. Read more