The Last Life (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Claire Messud
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The second half of the twentieth century
- Setting: The French Riviera, Algeria, Massachusetts, and New York City
- Principal Characters: Sagesse LaBasse, Carol LaBasse, Alexandre LaBasse, Etienne Parfait LaBasse, Jacques LaBasse, Monique LaBasse, Thibaud, Marie-José, Serge, Eleanor Robertson, Becky Robertson, Sami, Khalida
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, 1960’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Colonialism, France or French people, Suicide, New York City, Hotels, motels, or inns, Illegitimacy, Disabilities or physically challenged persons, Algeria or Algerians
- Locales: New York, NY, Massachusetts, Riviera, Algeria
“I am an American, Chicago born” is Augie March’s brash proclamation at the outset of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Sagesse LaBasse, however, is more subdued and more ambivalent. “I am an American now, but this wasn’t always so,” is how she begins her painful coming-of-age story and Claire Messud’s second novel, The Last Life. With “antennae for disaster,” Sagesse records a personal history shaped by revolution, exile, adultery, dementia, and suicide. Born in southern France to a father who came from Algeria and a mother who came...
[The entire page is 1836 words long]
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