The Last Life

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 hadreadily 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 eggplantspale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African datesthe 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 portthe 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 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 questionwas 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. Free Download [ The Last Life ] by [ Claire Messud ] – kino-fada.fr Like The Emperor s Children, The Last Life created its distinct seductive mood, while still providing recognizable and relatable details of, in this case, the life of a teenage girl forced to think for herself Though I enjoy...So far, I am not that impressed Messud shows a lot of skills, but her over the top prose with many words you only come across when studying for your GREs seems ill fitting when writing from the perspective of a teenage girl I find it hard to connect to the protagonist, a...The Last Life by Claire Messud Fifteen year old Sagesse La Basse muses about her life and family to an extent that is occasionally interesting, but mostly boring and without a central theme Her American mother and French Algerian father are respectively looked down upon and dominated by her martinet paternal grandfather and his patrician wife The grandfather immigrated to France from Algeria, along with wife and daughter, to open a small hotel on France s Mediterranean coast They left The Last Life by Claire Messud Fifteen year old Sagesse La Basse muses about her life and family to an extent that is occasionally interesting, but mostly boring and without a central theme Her American mother and French Algerian father are respectively looked down upon and dominated by her martinet paternal grandfather and his patrician wife The grandfather immigrated to France from Algeria, along with wife and daughter, to open a small hotel on France s Mediterranean coast They left Algeria because of the coming war for independence from France, but Algeria always remains their hearts homeland and seems to have a central role in Sagesse s understand...The Last Life was movingly written not happy, but deeply affecting The last third of the book was the best, as the protagonist reflects on what has happened and the personalities and motivations of family members driving the story s action For me as a young middle aged adult, the book raised a lot of inter...A gift sent by dear TA, thanks you so much friend Another book with a passport.This is the story of a French Algerian family saga, told by her daughter Sagesse LaBasse She describes how they have beed discriminated by the French, how their culture overcome their difficult times after World War II Camus is quite often cited along this book.In order to regain her own identity, Sagesse decided to move to United States.A very well written book, even if her first book The Emperor s Children was A gift sent by dear TA, thanks you so much friend Another book with a passport.This is the story of a French Algerian family saga, told by her daughter Sagesse LaBasse She describes how they have beed discriminated by the French, how their culture overcome their difficult times after World War II Camus is quite often cited along this book.In order to regain her own identity, Sagesse decide...It s a little hard to connect with Messud s characters At her best, it slike being benignly haunted than reading.I am in shock thatpeople did not find this book ridiculously boring Seriously I had the hardest time caring about any of the characters besides Sagesse and her brother I cared a little bit about Sagesse s slutty friend, apparentlythan she did a bit about her summer paramour, again, apparentlythan sh...Claire Messud is a beautiful writer so it pains me to say I did not enjoy The Last Life Maybe it is because this is outside of my usual genre but I was very bored during this read I love the fact that Claire was weaving the histories of many different generations into what could have been a very inspiring story, but I found myself skimming chapters and even skipping some all together because I just couldn t get into it I gave two stars because you can t ignore her talent and I think if she wo Claire Messud is a beautiful writer so it pains me to say I did not enjoy The Last Life Maybe it is because this is outside of my usual genre but I was very bored during this read I love the fact that Claire was weaving the histories of many different generations into what could have been a very inspiri...I really ought to give up on Claire Messud She writes about big issues I am interested in the fallout from the French leaving Algeria in this book but somehow deals with them in such a way that I find I care less at the end of the book than I did at the beginning Contrast the Michael Haneke film Cach , that dealt with the same subject so muchpowerfully I think, perhaps, it s that she doesn t take many risks as a writer, doesn t let the really powerful undercurrents rise up into her I really ought to give up on Claire Messud She writes about big issues I am interested in the fallout from the French leaving Algeria in this book...Claire Messud is a gifted writer and every line is crafted I found myself unable to put this book down because of her beautiful prose, but the storyline utself was mediocre I found the same kind of letdown at the end of this novel as her previous novel, The Empe...

• English
• 25 February 2017
Claire Messud
• Paperback
• 400 pages
• 0156011654
• Claire Messud
• The Last Life