"We are each the love of someone's life." So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other.
Born with the physical appearance of an elderly man, Max grows older mentally like any child, but his body appears to age backwards, growing younger every year. And yet, his physical curse proves to be a blessing, allowing him to try to win the heart of the same woman three times as at each successive encounter she fails to recognize him, taking him for a stranger, so giving Max another chance at love.
Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, questioning the very nature of love, time, and what it means to be human.
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Over Max's narration of the preceding decades of his life, he offers outsider's snapshots of San Francisco and all of America across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout, Greer uses the literary device of reverse aging to interrogate the evolution of social conventions, the finitude of a human life, and the decay of memory. Max wants love. But his curse destines him to deception. He loses his wife, Alice, changes his name, and remains hidden from his own son to keep his true identity secret. Only his lifelong friend, Hughie, stands by Max and can see the person inside the anachronistic body. Like the best science fiction and myth, the novel uses its central conceit to reveal human prejudice and explode all assumptions of normalcy to profound effect.
Love is a destructive force in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. But Greer recognizes that in the failure of love is also hope. He artfully captures Max's fragile world with a delicacy that never crosses into sentimentality but also avoids the monumental scale of tragedy. As Max says near the end of the novel, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love." A journey with Max, while brave and beautiful, is hardly a waste. --Patrick O'Kelley
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Book Description Softcover. Condition: new. First Edition. From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Less comes Andrew Sean Greers extraordinarily haunting love story The Confessions of Max Tivoli told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwardsA Today Show Book Club PickWe are each the love of someones lifeSo begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other At his birth Maxs father declares him a nisse a creature of Danish myth as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old dying creature Max grows older like any child but his physical age appears to go backwardon the outside a very old man but inside still a fearful childThe story is told in three acts First young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl Alice who ages as normally as any of us Max of course does not as a young man he has an older mans body But his curse is also his blessing as he gets older his body grows younger so each successive time he finds his Alice she does not recognize him She takes him for a stranger and Max is given another chance at loveSet against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century Maxs life and confessions question the very nature of time of appearance and reality and of love itself A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination Andrew Sean Greers The Confessions of Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a monster a being who confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human. Seller Inventory # DADAX0312423810
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