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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 Lifeexplores the weight of isolation and exile in one French family. Of course, the adjectiveFrenchis 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 Lifeis 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 themouna, 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 thatThe Last Lifeinstantly falls.--Kerry Fried
Knockout...I'm still sleeping This is a wonderful book about what happens when the great niece of Albert Camus seduces her MFA professor at Amherst. Full of warm-hearted sketches of peasant life in New York and Boston, Messud takes us on a whirlwind tour of borrowed literary devices. There's not one laugh in the book, either. That would detract from the delicate mood. Messud makes sensuous love to her characters as sweet aromas gently waft across the pages. She is a true artisan of the well-made nothing. This book may not appeal to men or women, but others will rejoice.
Life in exile... at home Claire Messud's second novel is so far her masterwork: an impressively constructed and written account of a wealthy French Algerian family falling to pieces, and their history of how they got to the point they're at. The breaking of the narrative down into numbered sections is beautifully done, and you find yourself deeply caring for what happens to the narrator, Sagesse (who unfortunately becomes a bit of a pill by the end) and her family members. Her troubled grandfather, snobbish grandmother, exuberant father and (especially) her emotionally wounded mother emerge off the pages as full and breathing characters, and the changes they go through seem extremely natural and believable. The novel is an account of what it means to be an alien in one's own country, and how this particularly becomes inflected by France's traumatic colonial involvement with Algeria. While Messud's prose at times becomes a bit precious, the novel is for the most part masterfully written and quite moving. This is a writer from whom to expect great things in the future.Great book I won't comment on the writer's perfect prose but rather on how she perfectly managed to write about feelings which are so characteristic to French Algerians. Their wistfulness, their exuberant but aloof manners, the sentiment that they had not yet completed their journey from Algeria to France and somehow got lost in between - probably into the depths of their beloved Mediterranean sea. This is a story of a shipwreck and its stranded victims, people who were sent away from Algeria and proved incapable to integrate in the new haven provided by their motherland. In this way, this book is a not only a feat of storytelling but a profound description of a collective malaise. Anyone who - as an individual or a member of a minority - has experienced estrangement could read and learn from the Sagesse's experience.
