The Confessions of Max Tivoli FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
When Max Tivoli is born in 1871, his parents are shocked to find that his body is that of an elderly man. Such is the beginning of Max's life in reverse: As he grows older, his body grows younger. At the end of his life, he finds himself in the body of an 11-year-old boy, writing his memoirs from the safety of a playground sandbox.
Framing his second novel with this unusual device, Andrew Sean Greer has penned a love story: the story of Max's love for one woman, Alice, and the chances he has to act on that love. When they first meet, Alice is the girl next door, but 17-year-old Max is already trapped in the body of a 55-year-old man, an unacceptable suitor for a young girl. Alice ages normally while Max grows younger until a chance meeting in their mid-30s paves the way for a potentially happy future. But Max cannot halt the backward progression of his body any more than Alice can prevent the decline of her own, and Max is left heartbroken and alone. Greer's wildly inventive premise may strike readers as similar to The Time Traveler's Wife, but his artful narration, and the unsparing honesty of his uniquely resourceful and sympathetic protagonist, carry this novel beyond a simple comparison. (Winter/Spring 2004 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
An extraordinarily haunting love story told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards
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. At his birth, Max's 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 backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child.
The 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 man's 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 love.
Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's 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, 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Max may be a monster, but he is a profoundly human one, a creature whose unusual disorder, far from making him a freak to be wondered at, simply magnifies his normal and recognizable emotions, sharpening their poignancy. The course of true love, after all, doesn't run smooth -- even for those of us whose biological clocks move forward. So Max turns out to be not so strange a beast after all. He's doomed to improvise his way through life, just like the rest of us, dodging heartbreak and disappointment at every step, forever baffled by the absurd, hopeless ordeal of loving another human being.
— Gary Krist
The Washington Post
Greer's tale succeeds not by cataloguing the plentiful oddities of Max's condition (which it would be all too easy to imagine had the book been composed by a lesser writer, with an eye to a "Forrest Gump"-style screenplay treatment). Instead, Greer shapes Max's story into much the same outline of a conventionally forward-moving life -- experience and enthusiasms overlapping in fits and starts, with precious little regard for orderly progress or any maturity beyond "the ordinary sadness of the world." Indeed, Max, endlessly sympathetic, observant and articulate though he is, does not emerge by any means as a blameless hero in his life story. By virtue of his ruthless uprooting of his identity and past in his continuous epic pursuit of Alice, he does bitter violence to those who care completely for the person he actually is. — Chris Lehmann
Publishers Weekly
With a premise straight out of science fiction (or F. Scott Fitzgerald), Greer's second novel plumbs the agonies of misdirected love and the pleasures of nostalgia with gratifying richness. Max Tivoli has aged backwards: born in San Francisco in 1871 looking like a 70-year-old man, he's now nearly 60 and looks 11. Other than this "deformity," the defining feature of Max's life is his epic love for Alice Levy, whom he meets when they are both teens (though he looks 53). Max's middle-aged gentility endears him to Alice's mother and, like an innocent Humbert Humbert, he allows Mrs. Levy to seduce him so that he might be near his love. When he steals a kiss from Alice, the Levys flee. But heartbroken Max gets another chance: when he encounters Alice years later, she does not recognize him, and he lies shamelessly and repeatedly to be near her again. Max's parents, whose marriage is itself another story of Old San Francisco, have advised him to "be what they think you are," and he usually is. But his lifelong friend Hughie Dempsey knows Max's secret, and is intimately connected to the story that unfolds, via Max's written "confessions," in small, explosive revelations. "We are each the love of someone's life," Max begins; it is the implications of that statement, rather than the details of a backward existence, that the novel illuminates. Greer (The Path of Minor Planets) writes marvelously nuanced prose; with its turn-of-the-century lilt and poetic flashes, it is the perfect medium for this weird, mesmerizing and heartbreaking tale. (Feb.) Forecast: Greer's novel is a prime candidate for handselling-as effusive praise for it from booksellers suggests-and blurbs from Michael Chabon and Michael Cunningham will catch browsers' attention. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Max Tivoli has an unusual malady: born with the appearance of an elderly man, he appears progressively younger and younger as he ages. Max's dilemma is illustrated by his relationship with Alice Levy, his first and only love. Clearly, romance isn't an easy proposition; when they first meet, he's more of a grandfatherly figure to her, and complications arise when Alice's mother grows attached to this enigmatic man. Only at the midpoint of Max's life does he approach anything resembling normalcy, with a brief marriage to Alice and the fathering of a child (these are the novel's most touching moments), but that happiness obviously cannot last. Near the end of his life, his desire to be near Alice and their son causes him to masquerade as an abandoned child to receive at least some sort of love from the unaware mother. There's a good deal of pathos to be wrung from this story of hopelessly elusive love, but Greer (The Path of Minor Planets) never pushes the natural sentiment of the story over the edge into treacle. He thus transforms an idea that could very easily have been a mere novelty into something surprisingly and genuinely affecting. Highly recommended.-Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A man who ages backward in late-19th-century San Francisco recounts his inverted but ultimately rewarding life: a quirky second novel from the author of The Path of Minor Planets (2001). Born to wealthy San Franciscans in 1871, Max Tivoli is pronounced a "Nisse," or little Danish gnome, a time-altered creature who starts out as an old man and gradually grows younger until he attains babyhood and death-calculated by his grandmother at 1941. Yet Max grows only physically younger, while his mind reflects his actual years, prompting his family and himself perpetually to pass him off in public as someone he isn't-like the performing bear at Woodward's Gardens. Max's Danish father abruptly vanishes from the house (he's believed to have been "shanghaied") when Max is 16, forcing him and his pregnant mother to move from tony Nob Hill to their old house in South Park, where Max (presented as his mother's brother-in-law) falls hopelessly in love with the 14-year-old daughter of widow Levy, a tenant downstairs. Yet because of Max's still-elderly appearance, he despairs of winning young Alice's love, and instead allows the widow to seduce him-though when she discovers his secret, she flees with her daughter: they don't reappear until Alice and Max are both, harmoniously, in their 30s. In a most ingenious (and Freudian) manner, Alice becomes truly the mutable love of Max's life, functioning as his first love, then as his wife, and then-shockingly-as his mother in his final preadolescent years. By that time, in 1930, Max knows he has few more lucid days left and begins penning his life story. Artifices indeed proliferate in Greer's nutty scheme for a novel, but if the reader can persevere beyond thefirst few convoluted pages-"So many things stand in the way of anyone ever hearing my story"-the delights are many, among them gossamer prose, vivid characterization, and historic snapshots of a fabulous American city. Old-fashioned narrative fun in a literary hall of mirrors.
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