The Last Life: A Novel - Hardcover

Messud, Claire

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004714 ISBN 13: 9780151004713

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

The Last Life is the story of the teenage Sagesse LaBasse and her family, French Algerian emigrants. It is set in colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England. The LaBasse family had always believed in the permanence of their world, in which stories created from the past had the weight of truth, in which cynicism was the defense against disaster. But when shots from the grand-father's rifle shatter an evening's quiet, their world begins to crumble, the reality to emerge: the bastard son abandoned by the family before he was even born; Sagesse's handicapped brother for whom the family cared with Catholic dignity; her American mother who pretended to be French; the trigger-happy grandfather; and Sagesse's father, whose act of defiance brought down the Hotel Bellevue, her grandfather's house built on rock, to its knees. Observed with a fifteen-year-old's ruthless regard for truth, The Last Life is a beautifully told novel of secrets and ghosts, love and honor, the stories we tell ourselves, and the lies to which we cling.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151004714
• ISBN 13: 9780151004713
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352