The Last Life

by Claire Messud

Overview

A “mesmerizing” novel from the acclaimed author of The Emperor’s Children that is “as artful as it is affecting” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).

Moving between colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England, The Last Life is Claire Messud’s “masterly” (Wall Street Journal) sophomore novel of lies and ghosts, love and honor. When shots from a grandfather’s rifle shatter the LaBasse family’s quiet integrity, long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before he was even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed, a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue—the family business—to its knees. Unforgettably narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard for truth, The Last Life is a “phenomenally controlled tour de force” (Sarah Kerr, Vogue).

“Messud textures her novel with all the sensory pleasures that bind us to life, and fills it with characters who helplessly respond to each other’s unspoken signals and nuances.”—The New Yorker

“Original, intense, and gripping.”—Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393881790
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/08/2022
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	298,814
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hometown:

Somerville, MA, USA

Place of Birth:

Greenwich, CT, USA

Education:

BA in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1987, MA in English Literature, Jesus College, Cambridge University, 1989

Read an Excerpt

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.

What People are Saying About This

Norman Rush

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)

Jane Mendelsohn

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.

Andrea Barrett

In this rich, resonant, beautifully written novel, Claire Messud brilliantly illuminates the dislocations of body and soul that are the true consequences of exile.

Penelope Fitzgerald

Claire Messud is a deeply interesting young writer.
— (Penelope Fitzgerald, Author of The Bookshop and The Blue Flower (Houghton Mifflin), Booker Prize winner)

Margaret Livesey

Only a writer as intelligent as Claire Messud could have written The Last Life. With its vivid characters, exotic settings, and deep moral questions, this is an elegant and gripping novel.

Cynthia Ozick

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)

Maureen Howard

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.

From the Publisher

"A phenomenally controlled tour de force . . . Every step feels stunningly sure. –Vogue
"Haunting and evocative . . . Messud's is a novel rich in detail and warmly conveyed. . . . In its beautiful last pages, connections become crystalline, showing how we are linked in ways far deeper than religion, nationality or even blood-lines can delineate."-San Francisco Chronicle
"Remarkable . . . Messud has written a very serious book-always original, intense, and gripping."-The New York Review of Books

Reading Group Guide

1. What is the significance of the novel's title? To whose life or what life does it refer?

2. How would you describe Sagesse's relationship with each member of her family? How does each relationship affect her view of the family and its history and her own developing sense of self?

3. What are the causes and consequences of the LaBasse family's zealous maintenance of its secrets and its own mythology as a defense against the outside world? What actions and events contribute to the collapse of the family's defenses?

4. How does the sequence in which the details of the LaBasses' past are disclosed affect Sagesse's and our understanding of what happens to the family and to Sagesse during her fourteenth and fifteenth years? Why are past events disclosed in just this sequence and in such detail?

5. How does this novel illustrate our need to create personal, familial, and communal fictions or myths to sustain our sense of identity on those three levels? How does each character slant stories of the past to his or her advantage?

6. What kinds of exile, banishment, and displacement occur throughout the novel and throughout the LaBasse family's history? To what extent does Sagesse or the author suggest that every life is one of exile or displacement?

7. At the beginning of the novel, Sagesse tells us that she is an American by choice, "But it is a mask." References to masks and disguises recur throughout her story. What other masks does Sagesse herself put on? What masks do the other LaBasses wear?

8. Of the days preceding her grandfather's trial, Sagesse wonders, "What...was my brother to me, in all this confusion." How would you answer thatquestion? What is Etienne's role in Sagesse's life, in the life of the LaBasse family, and in the novel? What does Sagesse mean when she says of herself and her brother, "But we were the same..."?

9. Sagesse thinks of the morning after the disastrous Cape Cod party as a "rupture" between past and present. What other incidents, in addition to the shooting, contribute to this view for Sagesse? What other characters experience similar moments, past or present?

10. "Even at fourteen," Sagesse says, "I was well aware...that the bonds of faith, religious and otherwise, governed the tiniest movements of our household." How would you describe those bonds and their importance within the LaBasse family? What kinds of faith other than religious are important within the family? Why might it be inevitable that these bonds of faith loosen and disintegrate?

11. As Sagesse's and her grandfather's eyes meet in the courtroom, she is "aware that the look that passed between us was one of agonizing recognition." What do you think each of them recognizes? What does Sagesse mean when she goes on to describe that moment as an "instant of dreadful mutuality"?

12. What is the importance of Augustine and Camus to Sagesse's --and our -- understanding of her family's Algerian background and its influence on their -- and Sagesse's -- beliefs and behavior? What is the importance of her observation that both Augustine and Camus said "Yes" to life "with a desperation and a defiance that can have been born only of 'no'"? What roles do desperation and defiance play in the lives of the LaBasses?

13. After her father's suicide, Sagesse recognizes "that some central, invisible force that had kept the LaBasses in organized orbit had vanished, flinging each of us, and my father furthermost, out into the ether alone." What might that central force have been? What force or forces have kept the family "in organized orbit" up until this time? What 1force or forces have torn the family apart?

14. "It is a terrible thing to be free," Sagesse says after her father's death, and notes that "constraints are what define us, in life and in language alike." How does Messud present the conflict between freedom and constraint?

Copyright © 2000. Published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Inc.
Written by Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey

Editorial Reviews

Remembrance of Things Past

"I find myself wanting to translate the world inside..."

Sagesse LaBasse, the teenage protagonist of Claire Messud's The Last Life, lives in a fragile world held together by the secrets of its past. Her family owns the Hotel Bellevue, a summer retreat for the well-to-do, set on the cliffs of southern France; the view is back toward Algeria, which her paternal grandparents fled during its struggle for independence from France. As her grandmother laments, "Every morning, I wake up and look out my window at the Mediterranean sea, vast and creeping, and I smell the pines and the heat on the breeze, rising up the clifftop, and I'm in Algiers again. I live, still, in my heart, in Algeria."

The loss of their homeland is always present to the LaBasses, and the consequent search for identity both reflects and compounds other difficulties. Sagesse's father ("fleshy, ingratiating, explosive") languishes under his own father's control, and is often unfaithful to Sagesse's mother, an American who tries to pass as French. Meanwhile, their young son, Etienne, is so severely mentally and physically impaired that his birth is likened to "the clanging of their prison door." Sagesse's grandmother looks on with cool resignation, and her grandfather, the family's hot-headed patriarch, will let no one rest. When, late one night, the old man fires his rifle into a group of children swimming at the hotel's pool, no one is seriously injured, but the family's livelihood is put at risk, and long-simmering resentments find an outlet.

Sagesse is the perfect narrator for this fractured situation. She is neither French, nor American; not a girl, yet not quite a woman. Her grandfather's rash act causes her to lose her friends at school, and she is forced to "seek out the very pot-smokers I had...readily disparaged little over a month before." These new friends, upon realizing her family's past (having been French colonists, they are suspected of being racists, and members of the National Front) and relative wealth, also abandon her. With guests trickling away from the hotel, and tensions rising within the LaBasse family, Sagesse tries to understand what remains, and what place there might be for her.

Fortunately, while her life may be painful, she never finds it dull. Sagesse's language is rich and evocative, full of descriptive power. Here, for example, she witnesses the market: "There were vegetable men and fruit women and stalls selling both, blushing mounds of peaches alongside plump and purple eggplants...pale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar-speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African dates...the fishmongers sold their bullet-eyed, silver-skinned, slippery catch, blood-streaked fillets and orbed, scored steaks, milky scallops and encrusted oysters...." And here, a painting of the Bay of Algiers: "its apron of azure sea, erratically white-capped, broken by the sandstone finger of the port...the white rise of the city, a thousand precise terraces and roofs climbing into the sunlit sky, the European curlicues and the higgledy-piggledy casbah, all their outlines drawn as if with a single hair, interspersed with delicate little palms and cypresses and other trees of variegated greens, and with broad, brown avenues like branches."

A brilliant, complex world is formed by the accretion of these images, and they are juxtaposed and spur each other seamlessly, multiplying atmosphere and complicating plot lines. While most of the novel's events take place around 1990, Sagesse tells of them from a time almost a decade later (when she is a graduate student of the "history of ideas" at Columbia). This frame, constructed of occasional asides and short passages, allows a fluidity where revelations from the past and future cause momentum to shift and whirl -- the dead rise, their movements sharper and words more portentous with the reader's knowledge of coming tragedy. This later perspective also enables Sagesse to add deft hints and wise commentary. Looking back on herself, for instance, she says, "Children do not have words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood."

The Last Life stands as a testament to reflection, to making sense of an unruly past. It is also a kind of autobiography, an attempt to constitute an identity. In its ebb and flow of images, action, and ideas, the narrative deals so well with this attempt, implicitly, that it's unfortunate that it must also be treated explicitly. Frequent asides concerning identity and the nature of the self ("the one thing that would not leave me: the only and inadequate definition of my 'I.'") seem unnecessary; they lure Sagesse into self-dramatization, and contain the novel's most uneven prose. Some readers may find that such self-analysis helps characterize the narrator, but it's difficult to believe the story wouldn't be stronger without it.

Still, the novel's concern with such weighty questions is representative of its, and Sagesse's, fearlessness. As she seeks the truth about her family and herself, she also reflects on politics and race, dreaming of a "Mediterranean culture democratic and polyphonous" while simultaneously acknowledging its impossibility. This seeming contradiction must be borne, she learns, since to blindly accept what has happened is to forget alternatives and to repeat mistakes. "I live as if this might-have-been existed," she writes, "shimmering in the imaginary; and if it is but an 'as if,' I have learned, then it is none the less real for that."

The Last Life ultimately concerns itself with questions of fate and self-determination. In a world of disasters, Sagesse wonders if and how they might have been avoided: "The abiding question...was it fate? Is our ending inscribed in our beginning -- and, if so, in whose beginning?" The "obvious answer," she says, is that we cannot escape our fate, that our choices are illusory. The richness found in her story, however, suggests the less obvious answer -- that we might affect our fate, and better confront the present and future, if we work to come to an understanding with our past.

—Peter Rock

bn.com

In the narrowest possible reading, The Last Life appears to be another entry in the well-worn coming-of-age genre, detailing as it does an adolescent girl's awkward, painful transition into adulthood. But told in reflection by the same girl 10 years later, Claire Messud's sprawling, beautifully wrought faux-memoir benefits from a much wiser perspective, exploring how three generations of knotty family history have profoundly shaped a young woman's identity. At first, Sagesse LaBasse, the privileged 14-year-old daughter of a French-Algerian father and an American mother, seems perfectly healthy and well-adjusted, with no greater concerns than filling lazy summer afternoons at her grandfather's three-star hotel on France's southern coast. But Sagesse and her parents are experts at maintaining this cheery façade, which conceals its dysfunction from the outside world. That changes when her grandfather, in an irrational fit of rage, shoots his rifle at a group of unruly teenagers, injuring her friend and turning the community against them. As the resulting maelstrom stirs up the LaBasses' clashing nationalities and bitter old secrets, Sagesse clings to her severely disabled brother, whose blank innocence remains constant regardless of the occasion. With graceful, enveloping prose, Messud leads her through the fickle cliques and stop-and-start romances of the average teenager while disturbing pieces of family history gradually come to light. At its core, The Last Life is about the importance of identity--sexual, ethnic, and familial--as a stabilizing force and the psychological scars collected by those who are robbed of its comforts. In every sense an exile, the older Sagesse bravely recalls the afflictive memories of "a home that exists only in the imaginary," a form of therapy that grows more poignant as the book progresses.
— Orion.com

Scott Tobias

An assured and engaging debut.

NY Times Book Review

A fine first novel-and the "first" is deceptive, for its author has the daring and the assurance to take on Iris Murdoch-like questions about goodness and truth...Messud's gaze never wavers.

New Yorker

A beautifully observed portrait.

Harpers Bazaar

An intelligent and spirited narrative, an intriguingly skillful experiment.

Times Literary Supplement

Loss of innocence--for a young girl, her family and her nation--is 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 values--overweening pride and social snobbery--that 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 scenes--Sagesse acting out her adolescent insecurity during a summer with her relatives in New England, for example--are 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 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.--Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Silver Spring, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Where Messud outstrips the competition is in her tenacious grip on psychological realism; she plumbs the moral shallows of her characters with a brutal regard for honesty.

The New Criterion

Brooke Allen

Employing Jamesian prose and a healthy dose of wit, Messud brilliantly conjures LaBasse's 14-year-old consciousness. Equal parts coming-of-age story and novel of ideas, The Last Life makes one anxious for more from Messud.
—Time Out New York

Freeman

...[A] large part of my enthusiasm for this novel arises from the prose itself, an exquisite medium of artfully chosen images and memorable phrases as when Sargasse describes herself as "trapped in the whispering unease of my parents' house,"
—From The Nation, October 18, 1999

Jay Parini

...[S]o vivid, its rendering of the conflicting claims of memory and denial so fraught with felt emotion, that the reader might easily mistake it for a memoir....Ms. Messud has written a large and resonant novel that is as artful as it is affecting....[A] thoughtful meditation upon the uses of personal and public history and the need people have for creating narratives...about their families and themselves.
— The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Ms. Messud is a fine craftswoman of sentences. The emotioinal depth of her writing reaches down into the darkness, and the full detail of the ideas it explores is not easily grasped. This is a quietly powerful book that needs to be read in silence.

The Economist

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 half–Algerian-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 Algiers—and on to the psychic tolls taken on those who became no longer Algerian and not quite French either. Sagesse's 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 Sagesse's friends are using the hotel pool and making a great deal of modern, disrespectful teenage noise, her grandfather—well, he shoots at them. Wounding a girl, he ends up in court, goes to jail for six months—and 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 else—her own trials through adolescence; her American mother's strange and pale varieties of weakness; the probable feelings of her profoundly retarded brother Etienne (and her own for him); her father's boyhood,maturation, marriage—and 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.

Kirkus Reviews

"A phenomenally controlled tour de force . . . Every step feels stunningly sure. –Vogue
"Haunting and evocative . . . Messud's is a novel rich in detail and warmly conveyed. . . . In its beautiful last pages, connections become crystalline, showing how we are linked in ways far deeper than religion, nationality or even blood-lines can delineate."-San Francisco Chronicle
"Remarkable . . . Messud has written a very serious book-always original, intense, and gripping."-The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher