Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
Family Secrets
By Gabriele Annan
The Last Life
by Claire Messud
Harcourt Brace, 352 pp., $24.00
Claire Messud's second novel centers on the year its heroine turns fifteen. Her name is Sagesse LaBasse and she lives on the Côte d'Azur, where her grandfather, a pied noir from Algeria, owns a hotel and runs it with the help of her father. Sagesse has a younger brother called Etienne, a slobbering, speechless, sweet-tempered creature strapped into a wheelchair. He was brain-damaged at birth, and Sagesse loves him. One day, she notices he has grown up: he has an erection. So she masturbates him and he comes. Afterward she feels she has done wrong. Not because of the incest:
Review, 2360 words
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