Books

On My Bookshelf

Even Harvard faculty members sometimes stray from reading hardcore academic books, especially when they're recovering from surgery, as Professor Howard Gardner told Ed. magazine in October, just after the rerelease of two of his classics: Changing Minds and Multiple Intelligences, and just before the publication of a new book that was already creating a buzz. In this issue's On My Bookshelf, Gardner chose to write about up-and-coming fiction writer Claire Messud on the day he was going to hear her at a book reading.

As a busy -- bordering on workaholic -- professional, I have scant time to read fiction for pleasure. Minor surgery in mid-August 2006 brought me some free time. I noted that my wife, Ellen, had accumulated, but not read, three books by a then-obscure young American author, Claire Messud. I picked up The Last Life and read this complex bildungsroman with mounting excitement. I immediately read the rest of Messud's published writings and announced to Ellen, "I've discovered a great new author." Not a moment too soon.

A few day's later, Messud's newest book, The Emperor's Children, received a rave front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, and within a few weeks, Messud was on the fiction bestseller list -- an impressive achievement for what the media termed a "serious 39-year-old author."

Messud is an original. She has an uncanny ability to write knowingly about places where she has never lived -- New York City, Bali, Russia, a remote Scottish isle -- and about characters whom she could only have invented -- a French-Algerian American family caught among several cultures. Like the great novelists of the nineteenth century, she is able to move, with seeming effortlessness, amongst the finest details of daily life, the consciousness of young persons and aged adults, and the perennial philosophical issues of life and love. Her future as a writer seems wide open, almost limitless. And to top it off, she lives with her family in Somerville, and so it would be easy to start a local fan club.

The Last Life: A Novel
By Claire Messud
Harvest/HBJ Book, 2000

The Emperor's Children
By Claire Messud
Knopf, 2006