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 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
