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The Confessions of Max Tivoli (Today Show Book Club #22) (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "We are each the love of someone's life..." (more)
Key Phrases: San Francisco, South Park, Max Tivoli (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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



From 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st ed/1st printing edition (February 1, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374128715
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374128715
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #680,063 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Andrew Sean Greer
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We are each the love of someone's life. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, South Park, Max Tivoli, Del Monte, Madame Dupont, Woodward's Gardens, Victor Ramsey, Golden Gate, Nob Hill, Asgar Van Daler, Splitnose Jim, Widow Levy, City Hall, Civil War, Conservatory of Flowers, Victoria Regina, Alice Ramsey, Blossom Rock, Hughie Dempsey, New York, Professor Martin, Uncle Max, Van Dater
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Customer Reviews

136 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (136 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking tale of a life lived backwards, March 11, 2004
By Eileen Rieback (Coral Springs, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Imagine being born an old man and growing physically younger. Imagine grappling with physical and chronological ages that are at odds with each other for all but a brief period in your middle age. Imagine falling in love and stopping at nothing to be near the one you love. Max Tivoli has had such a life. He is a protagonist like no other, and now he writes his confessions. No, not his memoirs... his confessions.

Max bares his soul, revealing the paradoxes, the ironies, and the cyclical patterns in his unique and tumultuous life. He documents his struggles against the currents of time, where he has had to keep reinventing himself as time moved inexorably forward for others. He laments the deceit and rejection he has had to practice to follow his mothers advice to "be what they think you are." He describes how his best friend, in stages, plays the role of his son, his brother, and his father. He memorializes a love that transcends drastically changing age differences.

Taking place in San Francisco around the turn of the twentieth century, when gaslights and carriages make way for electric lights and automobiles, the action centers on the three time periods in Max's life when his path crosses that of his love, Alice. In each of the three sections he reluctantly reveals, bit by bit, the surprising details that comprise the core of his life. His need for acceptance and love is portrayed in an entirely new and fresh way. The story evinces emotions that are powerfully heartrending. The writing is lyrical and full of imagery. This incredible novel will take your breath away, and I recommend it highly. If you only have the time to read one literary novel this season, make it this one.

Eileen Rieback

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33 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Woolf, Wilde, Kafka--and Oedipus in reverse, June 5, 2004
Andrew Sean Greer's fantastical allegory recalls, variously, Woolf's "Orlando," Wilde's "Dorian Gray," Kafka's "Metamorphosis," and even Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love." In addition to such high-minded precedents, however, the novel is not above stooping to the unabashed romanticism of the 1980 film "Somewhere in Time" (whose shameless mawkishness is, I'll admit, one my life's unjustifiable guilty pleasures). "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" is an odd blend of cynicism and sentimentality--but, somehow, it mostly works.

Greer's time-bending plot dishes up a unique twist: Max Tivoli is born with a 70-year-old body and an infant's mind, and ages to a 70-year-old with an infant's body. This conceit allows the author to imagine Max having three distinct chances at winning the love of his life--first as a father figure, then as a husband, and finally as a son--since Alice (his love) doesn't recognize him as being the same person each time. The novel does Sophocles one better, though Max himself wonders "is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation?"

Greer's love of storytelling and enviable cleverness mask the occasional outbreak of sentences you'd more expect to find in a bodice ripper: "With fingers spread beneath her scented hair, touching the landscape of her scalp like something beneath the sea." "Wide, oh, still lovely face, and yes, of course it was you. My little paper girl, crumpled in a pocket for half a century, unfolded now before me. . ."

What keeps such purple prose in check is the inescapable gloom of Max's impending demise. For Max, perception is reality, and he spends his life being not who he is, but the person others think he should be. And, unlike what you'll find in a dimestore romance novel, Max is a monster not only physically but also emotionally: his pursuit of happiness is so utterly selfish that he neglects to attend to the few people who love him in return.

A final aside: readers who enjoy the phantasmagoric, historical, and literary elements of Greer's novel might also get a kick out of the wit and epic scope of Marc Estrin's "Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa."
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Unlikable characters but fascinating story, May 16, 2005
By Ashley Megan "amazonfox" (Vernon, CT United States) - See all my reviews
  
This review is from: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel (Paperback)
Max Tivoli's father proudly declares him a "gnome" at his birth, and throughout the course of his backwards life Max will constantly question his "monstrous" blood. Indeed, his unique disability forces upon him choice after choice in which he must wound others if he is to experience any happiness of his own. It both ruins his relationship with Alice, his obsession and the love of his life, and offers him the bittersweet opportunity for another chance with her when she no longer recognizes the man who youthens, rather than ages. Max's relationships with Alice divide the book into thirds: first, he is her elderly-seeming landlord, then for a few short years he is her contemporary, and finally, as the book is told in flashback, Max returns to his old love in the guise of a child.

There's something depressing about a book in which you simply cannot bring yourself to love any of the main characters. With a single exception, the characters in "Max Tivoli" are selfish and self-centered, occasionally cruel and often insensitive, and delving into pathetic every time they reach for sympathy.

The exception is Hughie, who befriends Max when he is a child of six and looks like an old man, and stays with him his entire life until he is an old man in the body of a child. Hughie is almost the only person outside Max's family to know the truth, and his steadfast loyalty and unquestioning friendship were more heartwarming than anything else in this book. Forget the love story between Max and Alice - the truest love here is between Max and Hughie.

The first part of the book is richly steeped in the atmosphere of late nineteenth century San Francisco. It's full of lush detail and is firmly rooted in a sense of time and place; critical when you're dealing with a story such as this one, where time is of such vital importance. And yet, by the second third of the book, we start to drift apart from the setting, losing the essence of the era just as Max himself is starting to recognize what time is going to mean for him. Was this deliberate? Maybe. I can see the author transitioning, allowing Max's own life to become the yardstick by which we measure the passage of time, rather than the events of the outside world. But if so, it's a decision I don't agree with.

That's a minor quibble, though, and a question of style. And even the most unlikable characters are beautifully drawn, complex and all too human. Max's unusual lifespan is the frame upon which the story is built, and it's an original and interesting one, supporting the book without overwhelming it. I could go on and on about the parts that bugged me, but when I set the book down, my overall impression was Wow, that was a great book. In the end, that's all that matters.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting
Greer begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli with the statement "We are all the love of someone's life... Read more
Published 8 months ago by e. verrillo

4.0 out of 5 stars Definetely worth a read, but make sure you are in the mood for it.
This was very similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". The book was interesting, but a little slow at times. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Ashley M. Labrie

4.0 out of 5 stars In Hiding
We all know by now the "story" of this novel: in 1870 San Francisco, a child is born "old," and grows "young" for 70 years. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Julie Tepper

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully sad book!
I really enjoyed this and will most certainly keep an eye out for this author - I just loved the history of it, the sad magic and all of the lost love. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Yolanda S. Bean

3.0 out of 5 stars Cool borrowed premise; Excellent execution
A fascinating read about a man who ages backwards, starting off with the body of an old man and mind of an infant and ending up in the reverse situation. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Roy Pickering

4.0 out of 5 stars "I would be old until I was young, no sooner."
Max Tivoli is the bedeviled son of two loving parents whose funicular life delivers him into extremely bizarre consequences which would threaten most to insanity or nervous... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Miami Bob

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is so interesting! My fave book.
If you can suspend reality for a minute you will find that this book is AMAZING. Not only historical in nature (think old San Francisco), it is also, above all else, a love story... Read more
Published 12 months ago by L. Evans

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book, highly recommend it.
This book is great. Written well, keeps your attention and it's one that you will remember for years after you read it. Read more
Published 13 months ago by J. Kimes

3.0 out of 5 stars Poor Max!?
The Confessions of Max Tivoli is certainly an interesting story to say the least. I think that Mr. Greer was quite imaginative in his approach to this story. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Richard L. Mills, Jr.

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic! You'll love this one if ...
"Everyone loves someone.", begins Max Tivoli who phsyically ages backward. And that's a good clue that this book isn't just going to be an interesting sci-fi premise hashed about... Read more
Published 15 months ago by J. Lee

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