The Last Life (50 page)

As a graduate student, my field is the "history of ideas," a neat, evasive term that covers thought, not fact. I have opted for centuries of reflection over centuries of action, as though the two were separable. But the visions of the mind, more than the rubble of cities and the bones of men—the life behind the eye is what lingers. I am groping for a thesis, panic-stricken that its subject, like a religious vocation, has found me in spite of myself, or would, if only I would listen.

The effort to shut out the truths, my truths, is all the harder, in these past months; not simply because the university showers me with deadlines and forms, but because there is, now, a man I want to know. Not to caress and to pity, nor to lie to, or lie with, and abandon; but to know. I see him in the library, glimpse him in the delicatessen or the Polish pastry shop, his slender, old-fashioned briefcase dangling at his side, his cuffs too short for his bony wrists, his lonely brow furrowed in the effort of translation. We have not yet met, but I have asked about him, and I know what must somehow transpire. He is younger than I am, by a little, and lanky, and his black hair molds like astrakhan to his finely shaped skull. His skin is dusted, as if by dark sand, and his eyes, beneath their curling lashes, are green as the sea. Not long in America, he has washed up here like Phlebas the Phoenician, but alive, from the wars of his homeland—and of mine—of a home that exists only in the imaginary. His name is Hamed. How to tell him, who might have been my cousin, the stones I know? How to avoid it?

1. What is the significance of the novel's title? To whose life or what life does it refer?

2. How would you describe Sagesse's relationship with each member of her family? How does each relationship affect her view of the family and its history and her own developing sense of self?

3. What are the causes and consequences of the LaBasse family's zealous maintenance of its secrets and its own mythology as a defense against the outside world? What actions and events contribute to the collapse of the family's defenses?

4. How does the sequence in which the details of the LaBasses' past are disclosed affect Sagesse's and our understanding of what happens to the family and to Sagesse during her fourteenth and fifteenth years? Why are past events disclosed in just this sequence and in such detail?

5. How does this novel illustrate our need to create personal, familial, and communal fictions or myths to sustain our sense of identity on those three levels? How does each character slant stories of the past to his or her advantage?

6. What kinds of exile, banishment, and displacement occur throughout the novel and throughout the LaBasse family's history? To what extent does Sagesse or the author suggest that every life is one of exile or displacement?

7. At the beginning of the novel, Sagesse tells us that she is an American by choice, "But it is a mask." References to masks and disguises recur throughout her story. What other masks does Sagesse herself put on? What masks do the other LaBasses wear?

8. Of the days preceding her grandfather's trial, Sagesse wonders, "What ... was my brother to me, in all this confusion." How would you answer that question? What is Etienne's role in Sagesse's life, in the life of the LaBasse family, and in the novel? What does Sagesse mean when she says of herself and her brother, "But we were the same..."?

9. Sagesse thinks of the morning after the disastrous Cape Cod party as a "rupture" between past and present. What other incidents, in addition to the shooting, contribute to this view for Sagesse? What other characters experience similar moments, past or present?

10. "Even at fourteen," Sagesse says, "I was well aware ... that the bonds of faith, religious and otherwise, governed the tiniest movements of our household." How would you describe those bonds and their importance within the LaBasse family? What kinds of faith other than religious are important within the family? Why might it be inevitable that these bonds of faith loosen and disintegrate?

11. As Sagesse's and her grandfather's eyes meet in the courtroom, she is "aware that the look that passed between us was one of agonizing recognition." What do you think each of them recognizes? What does Sagesse mean when she goes on to describe that moment as an "instant of dreadful mutuality"?

12. What is the importance of Augustine and Camus to Sagesse's—and our—understanding of her family's Algerian background and its influence on their—and Sagesse's—beliefs and behavior? What is the importance of her observation that both Augustine and Camus said "Yes" to life "with a desperation and a defiance that can have been born only of no'"? What roles do desperation and defiance play in the lives of the LaBasses?

13. After her father's suicide, Sagesse recognizes "that some central, invisible force that had kept the LaBasses in organized orbit had vanished, flinging each of us, and my father furthermost, out into the ether alone." What might that central force have been? What force or forces have kept the family "in organized orbit" up until this time? What force or forces have torn the family apart?

14. "It is a terrible thing to be free," Sagesse says after her father's death, and notes that "constraints are what define us, in life and in language alike." How does Messud present the conflict between freedom and constraint?

Written by Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey