Customer Reviews

The Last Life: A Novel

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is the best novel I have read in 2 or 3 years. It is everything that fiction should be -- beautifully written, engaging, well-plotted and structured. It has several layers of meanings -- historical, family, philosophical and more -- and blends them all skillfully and interestingly. It makes the American grad student/writers' workshop "my parents were mean to me and then my professors were mean to me" trivia look childish and silly by comparison, as they are.

Anyone who says this is an adolescent girl's coming of age story is trivializing it. Ignore them. Read this book if you love literature.

I was particularly impressed with this young author's grasp of the meaning and texture of the lost world of French Algeria in the 1950's and '60's...particularly poignant when read in 1999 from another ruined and abandoned French colony, amid the decaying buildings of Phnom Penh...

I hope the author will write many more books and that her publishers will bring her first novel back into print -- I want to read it. Thank you, Ms. Messud, for writing such a wonderful work.

It seems from all the other reviews here that I've come pretty late to this writer, who, it says, has also authored When The World Was Steady. I'd never heard of her until I saw The Last Life in my local bookstore. The cover drew me in (couldn't decide what it was a view of), and then the writing, while I stood in the store. She's great! This is a brilliant book, that folded itself into my life over several days. Very provoking, very moving, and very ambitious. Not sentimental at all. Now I'm going to order the first one.

I didn't come to this novel expecting that much, because novels set in France about well-off kids are likely to get my goat. But I was completely blown away by this novel. It is fantastic -- very beautifully writtten, for starters, and with an almost epic complexity. What Mesud does is to tells the story of a Family of French Algerians living in France, and to move back and forward between their past (in Algeria) and present (in France), and the heroine's piotential future (in America). This is -- hold your breath -- a great book, sems to me. Reminds me a bit of that novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, that was made into a film. The same scope, the same historical sadness. Just terrific.

This was one of the best books I read in 1999. The writing is hauntingly beautiful. The narrator(Sagesse) tells the story of the fracturing of her life and family- And the fracturing and restructuring of the family in the past. But the story is not just this simple. Messud explores nationality, the ideas of belonging-and not belonging simultaneously. This is always the outsider's view of the culture. Sagesse's family is not truly at home either in Algeria or France- anymore than Sagesse is later at home in The U.S. Besides being beautifully written, the book forces the reader to think and re-examine ideas. I found my mind did not leave this book even after I put it down.

I started this book with excitement, having been a fan of Messud's last novel, When The World Was Steady. It's much more deep and rich than the first book, but that also brings some problems, I thought. Sometimes, the narrator is too wordy for me -- made me think of those Henry James novels I never could finish. But stick with it! The story is so beautiful, the characters so real, and France, the South of France, is completely alive in colors, like Matisse and Picasso. It is lovely at the end.

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.

Just a stunning achievement, this book builds steadily from an already impressive beginning, leaving little time to even catch one's breath. Messud's prose bears the mark of someone who can see the English language as an observer, yet manipulate it only as a native speaker could. What a breathtaking combination. I have not read a better book this year and can only compare it to last year's The Hours by Michael Cunningham. This is a book to cherish, to give to friends, epecially those who 'get it,' and to reread again and again as the years go by. It has gained a steady berth on my bedside table.

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.

Three generations of La Basse, a French-Algerian family. The narrator is the teenage granddaughter, Sagesse, who feels she is inappropriately named because her name means wise, although the reader will disagree. As a young teenager she begins to see and confront the family for its false appearances but does not completely understand or know the ties and the lies that bind it together until almost the end of the novel, which spans some years. The authoritarian grandfather and icy grandmother run the family with a tyrannical kind of love that imprisons Sagesse, her brother Etienne, who suffers from a birth defect, her American mother Carol, and her father, Alexandre. Grand-pere owns the resort hotel that he built himself and hopes to make into his dynasty. The grandparents and Alex mourn the loss of the family home in Algiers, which they left when French rule was over in 1962, and which is referred to in anecdotes. As two tragedies converge in the present, the early 1990's, the past or last life, the Algerian life intrudes, the family and its myths crumble, as does Sagesse's innocence, and she is the one left to find out the truth about her family, who she is, and who she wants to be. A moving, sad story, yet with hope finally, well plotted and intelligent, with complex characters fully rendered. Long, but not overbearing passages in which Sagesse is grappling with what is real, what is truth as she learns about Camus, Sarte, and St. Augustine in school act as seamless metaphors. In beautifully rendered descriptions, the story travels alternately between the French Mediterranean Coast, Algeria, and the East Coast of the U.S.

What a beautifully written, perfectly executed book! I loved how Messud intertwined each generation's family history into the present history of the teen girl narrator, Sagesse. The sins of the father will visit upon the son, indeed....or in this case, the granddaughter. Messud's command of language is impressive and her prose is so lyrical and magical---perhaps a bit too lyrical for a 15-year old Algerian girl---but that is a minor point. The book itself is perfectly paced and exquisite. I highly recommend it.