Algeria: The Last Life

The Last Life
by Claire Messud

I really wanted to like this book.  I actually did like parts of it, but as a whole, I felt I had to trudge through to the end.  Trudging is not an adjective you want to use when describing a book-reading experience.  Nor is plodding, but this book plodded as much as it trudged.  At least for me.  The reviews I checked out on Goodreads, my quick and easy, one stop resource for reader feedback on books, seemed to reflect opinions divided neatly down the middle.  People either really loved it, or really did not.

The Last Life is my selection for Algeria; however, most of the story takes place in France.  We see Algeria through the lens of reminiscence and memory, not as a place where the novel's action takes place.  Sagesse is our 15-year old narrator, who views herself as French and tries to downplay, or even hide, her Algerian heritage, which belongs to her through her father and paternal grandparents.   She is unwittingly caught up in cultural and political upheaval as she navigates her adolescence in an unhappy home, where her domineering grandparents and meek father pine away for their days in the country they think of as home ... Algeria.  They are, in fact, not Algerian by ethnicity.  Rather, they are among the pied-noir, which means "black boot" in French and was the name used to refer to French colonialists who settled in Algeria and reprehensibly mistreated those native to the land.  Sagesse's father and his family were chased from Algeria, along with the other pied-noir, during an uprising, and returned to their homeland of France.  At the time in which the novel takes place, the liberal youth in France are revisiting  their colonialist history and deeming it immoral.  This leaves many, including Sagesse's grandparents and father, not feeling that they have anywhere to truly call home.

Sagesse's grandfather's misery manifests in a moment of anger and violence that has enormous repercussions for everyone and sets off a series of shocking events that essentially tear the family apart at the seams.  Sagesse doesn't know where she belongs, and the novel is about her journey as she seeks to understand her place in the world, both in terms of where she is rooted and where she seeks to go.  I like coming-of-age stories for their honesty and for how they reflect the feelings and conflicting emotions that are universal to nearly all adolescents.  This element of The Last Life is what I enjoyed the most ... that, and the unusual character of Etienne, who is Sagesse's severely disabled younger brother and a foil for the complexity of the social issues that so profoundly impact Sagesse's world despite her lack of involvement in the history of those issues.

If you like deeply philosophical novels, you might enjoy this one.  Really, there's more philosophy here than story.  You might want to read up on French colonization of Algeria and the post-colonial protests that took place first in Algeria and later in France.  I had to stop midway through the novel and do a little research in order to follow the story.  Messud might have won me over a little more if she'd woven in some background rather than sending me off to Google and Wikipedia on my own.