This is very much my favorite of the three books by Claire Messud that I've read (The Woman Upstairs, The Emperor's Children). It is a coming of age story, in which I found much that seemed familiar--which is saying something, since it takes place in the South of France, is about the complicated history of France and Algeria, includes a handicapped brother and a suicide. Messud has a great ear for dialogue, family tension, and just how fraught it is to be an adolescent. ( )

Just a terrific novel. I have no idea if "The Last Life" is in any way autobiographical, but it feels too real and is too perceptive not to be. The author gets so much exactly right here that I'm really sort of shocked that this one isn't better known. It is, in a sense, a study of various ways you can be an outsider: the book's half-American half-French main character is the granddaughter of French Algerians who fled to the south of France when everything fell apart in the sixties. She's got a younger brother who's severely brain-damaged and must receive constant care. After her grandfather commits a shocking criminal act, she's more on her plate than the average teenager does. I can't say I know a lot about the French experience in North Africa, but Messud carefully traces contemporary French attitudes about it while describing the way that their flight from Algiers continues to influence her characters' stifling, if materially comfortable, family life. The book prose is note-perfect and flows easily over the page, but at the same time there's something oppressive about this: the author clearly wants to demonstrate just how heavily an increasingly distant past can weigh on the present present and the ways that identities that we don't really get to choose can make us feel trapped. In other words, it's also a book about the gradations of irretrievable loss.

Of course, I admit that the book might work for me because I'm a grown-up third-culture kid with my share of warm memories for a couple of places with complicated histories that were and are beset by unjust social conditions. Like this book's protagonist, I felt I lost an irretrievable bit of myself when I left them, and like her, I know that you can't really go back. A lot of people will argue the sort of thorough examination of cultural identity that Messud performs here is really not much more than navel-gazing, and well, they might not be entirely wrong. But Sagasse's intense, complicated relationships with her parents, their disintegrating marriage, and her mother's ultimately unsuccessful bid to become fully integrated into a French family that already carries more than its share of shame and secrets are also dealt with beautifully in "The Last Life." So are the main character's first, tentative forays into sexuality and her all-too-real distress she feels about the set of increasingly difficult choices facing her. So are her description of the United States and American identity as seen from the outsides. So is the author's poignant, lovingly imagined vision of a culturally hybrid French-speaking, intercontinental Mediterranean, which, now that so much blood has been shed and so much time has past, seem unworkable, but not entirely impossible. So is everything, really. I'm a total mark for books that deal with these themes, so perhaps you should take this rave with a grain of Mediterranean sea salt. But even if I weren't, I think that there's just so much to recommend here. This one is just great. Go and get it now. ( )

Een tiener met een Amerikaanse moeder en een Algerijns-Franse vader vertelt haar eigen volwassen worden en haar fascinatie voor het tragische verleden van haar voorouders aan vaders kant. Zo ontrafelt ze de tragische geheimen van de familie. Tevens worden de historische achtergronden van de onafhankelijkheid van Algerije en de daarmee gepaard gaande terugkeer van vele Fransen naar eigen bodem – met alle problemen vandien- en de in Frankrijk groeiende nationalistische ideeën in een tweede laag gepast beschreven ( )

Across generations from Algeria to France to USA. Snarled family dynamics, certain expectations about 'proper' behavior and how to look away from what you know you are seeing.

Teenage daughter of a mixed marriage narrates her journey from Provence to New York and her family's voyage from colonial era Algeria to bourgeois provincial respectability. The precocious narrator in retrospect documents the dynamics of a fractured family and the geopolitics of france and its colonial odyssey. The book has its longeurs throughout - perhaps influenced by the leisurely detail of proust? - and for me never felt authentic in its Frenchness, falling into an easy orientalist exoticism. For me it was most powerful in addressing adolescent desire and in the portrayal of the mysteriously and profoundly handicapped Etienne. For me, an interesting fail