المراجعات-

• 

  Starred review from August 30, 1999
  Loss of innocence--for a young girl, her family and her nation--is the theme of Messud's resonant second novel. Plangent with the memories of a pivotal two-year period in the life of teenage narrator Sagesse LaBasse, the novel flashes back to three generations of the LaBasse family, pieds noirs who fled Algeria during the 1960s. Domineering patriarch Jacques, Sagesse's grandfather, establishes the Hotel Bellevue on France's Mediterranean coast and proclaims the family myth of invincibility. But the LaBasses suffer from the same vain and empty values--overweening pride and social snobbery--that led to the French debacle in Algeria. To Sagesse's piously Catholic parents, Alex and Carol, their severely handicapped son, Etienne, is the embodiment of the doctrine of Original Sin, and Carol cares for him at home because LaBasse women must sacrifice themselves for the good of the family. Etienne is also a blow to his parents' marriage, already foundering because of Alex's womanizing and their different cultural backgrounds: Carol is American, and has never been accepted by her stern in-laws. After intolerant, irascible grandp re shoots at rowdy teenagers on the hotel property, he is sentenced to prison, the LaBasses become social outcasts and Sagesse's friends abandon her. Alex briefly comes into his own and runs the hotel, but Jacques's release accelerates Alex's and the family's destruction. Messud (When the World Was Steady) sustains an elegiac tone in describing a seemingly ordered world that in reality is precarious; the LaBasses erect futile defenses against tragedies they are unable to prevent. In striking scenes, Messud recreates the last days of French rule in Algeria and the anomie of the ex-colonials, exiles from the land they love and strangers in their mother country. Sometimes these frequent flashbacks are awkward and not well integrated into the narrative. Yet some scenes--Sagesse acting out her adolescent insecurity during a summer with her relatives in New England, for example--are small gems. Questions of morality and mortality, of choice or fate or historical destiny, permeate the chronicle, adding coherence to a moving and insightful story. Agent, Georges Borchardt. Author tour.

• 

  Starred review from March 25, 2024
  Messud (The Burning Girl) draws from her own family history for this exquisite multigenerational saga of the Cassars, a pied-noir clan exiled from Algeria by the country’s 1954–62 war of independence. Patriarch Gaston Cassar and his wife, Lucienne, whose seemingly perfect marriage contains within it a scandalous secret (the particulars of which dovetail artfully in Messud’s telling with the lingering stain of colonialism on France and the pieds-noirs), make peace with their displacement by clinging to their Catholic faith. Their daughter, Denise, follows her parents from Buenos Aires to Toulon, France, nursing a series of unrequited loves and a fierce sense of injustice. Her older brother, François, earns a spot at one of France’s most prestigious lycées but can’t bear the damp cold of Paris, or the shame of being from a colonial outpost the rest of the nation is ready to abandon. He makes his way to America on a Fulbright fellowship and then to Oxford University, where he meets Barbara, a Canadian student drawn to his Gallic “insouciance.” Their marriage strains, but never breaks, under the weight of their cultural differences and Barbara’s frustrated ambitions. In the novel’s final sections, their youngest daughter, Chloe, reckons with the older generations’ physical and mental decline, and with her own sense of rootlessness. In her characteristically artful prose, Messud burrows inside the hearts and minds of her key players, bringing to their struggles and self-deceptions a deep-veined empathy made even more remarkable by how close she is to the story. This is a wonder.

• Cassandra Campbell's narration of the compelling places and people in this novel will engage listeners. With inspiration taken from her own family history, Messud's captivating audiobook spans seven decades, beginning in the 1940s, and traces several members of the Cassar family. Opening with the German invasion of France, this epic story is both a geographic journey and a generational one as the family members find themselves having to navigate the geopolitical climate, fulfill expectations, and find a home. Campbell paints a perfect visual picture for listeners. However, the accents of the multinational and multiethnic characters can be a bit distracting as some are done much better than others. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

معلومات العنوان+

• Publisher

  Recorded Books, Inc.

• OverDrive Listen

  تاريخ الإصدار:

معلومات الحقوق الرقمية+