Out of the womb in 1871, Max Tivoli looked to all the world like a tiny 70-year-old man. But inside the aged body was an infant. Victim of a rare disease, Max grows physically younger as his mind matures. In Andrew Sean Greer's finely crafted novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Max narrates his life story from the vantage point of his late fifties, though his body is that of a 12-year-old boy. He has known since a young age that he is destined to die at 70, and he wears a golden "1941" as a constant reminder of the year he will finally perish in an infant form. His mother, a Carolina belle concerned over her son's troubling appearance, curses Max with "The Rule": "Be what they think you are." Max fails to keep this Rule only a handful of times in his life, but it is the burden of living by it that wounds him and slowly alienates him from the people he loves.
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
this is a fast, engaging read. The premise is interesting and has loads of implications; too bad they weren't fully pursued. The ending was a bit nihilistic - another ending could have engaged the premise more fully...
While this book was well written, and I love quirky novels, something was really missing for me. The characters were not well-developed and were not particularly likeable, with the possible exception of Hughie.
Max could have been quite an endearing sort, but he just wasn't. In the beginning of the story, I imagined him smelling of sweat and cigars. Even in his youth, he wasn't compelling or sweet. I just could not shed any tears for Max or even care. This, after reading another novel, The Book Thief, which really [...] me in and had a huge cast of memorable characters. While Max was easily readable, I just didn't care about either him or Alice. Oh,well.
First, let me say that to all the people who disliked this novel, I can see where you're coming from. The subject matter is controversial, disturbing, and sometimes downright wrong, but ultimately, that is not what this book is about. This book is not about Max, nor is it about his love for Alice, nor is it about his difficulties with being accepted into society. At it's simplest level, this book is about love, devotion, and the ties that bind. This book is about this powerful emotion called love that is able to surpass even time.
Max is such a deeply flawed and broken character that I almost want to hate him. I almost want to despise him and disgust the things he does. But in spite of his obsessive love for Alice and his selfishness that causes him to push away his truest friend, Hughie, I still found myself, more often than not, rooting for Max to get a happy ending.
This book made me cry on two separate accounts, both of which I will not detail as it would spoil the novel. It is one of the few books that I have read in my lifetime that has left me with an empty feeling upon completion. I feel such a myriad of emotions: nostalgia, sorrow, understanding, acceptance. Mostly, I can't quite believe this journey is over.
This book is beautifully narrated, carefully crafted, and is overall a true gem of a novel.
