The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Rating:
Summary: Exceptional
Review: In summary, this is the story of a man named Max, born in the late 1800's at age 70. He must live his life backward, becoming physically younger as he ages.

This is a wonderful premise, and Greer does a good job despite the obvious problems with such a task. Max meets the woman who is love of his life at three different stages in his life, and their relationship changes with the circumstances of their meeting and their repective ages to each other.

This is not only a beautiful love story, but a wonderful tale about age and infirmity, and a history of San Francisco from the late 1800's to the mid 1900's. And gorgeous prose too.

Highly recommended for book clubs, and a must read for anyone interested in San Francisco.

Rating:
Summary: It Has Faults, but It's Very Human
Review: It seems that lately, a lot of books, in an effort to be original, are based more on "gimmicks" than true originality. Many of these "gimmicky" books are based on time travel or reversals in time. I found THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE to be one of the worst of the lot and I simply hated it.

Now, we have THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI, and, while I found it rather "gimmicky" and unbelievable (and I suspend my disbelief very easily), I still found it far, far better than THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE simply because it seemed more human, more honest and more sincere.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI concerns, Max Tivoli, of course. Max is unique in that he was born an old man (about seventy) and grows ever more youthful as time marches on. While this may sound wonderful, Max doesn't think much of it. For example, he knows, from the very beginning of his life, the date of his death (just as "normal" persons know that date of their birth) and, except for one brief instance, he can never really "act his age." (His mother advises him to "be what they think you are," but this really doesn't work for Max, either.)

Not being able to act his age complicates Max's life, but never more so than in the realm of romance. Early (or in Max's case, late) in his life, he finds his one, true love, Alice. Max falls in love with Alice when she is but fourteen, but Alice, alas, thinks Max is the proverbial "dirty old man." The upside to this is that Max gets to try again to win the affections of Alice more than once...three times, to be precise, at twenty-year intervals. (Since Max is growing younger year by year, Alice does not recognize him each time he tries to win her love.) Does Max win Alice? Well, that would certainly not be fair to answer because Max's unfailing love for Alice, and only Alice, is the anchor of this book. It's the reason (mostly) you keep on reading.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI is a highly original premise and one that would have worked wonderfully in the hands of a better writer. Unfortunately, Andrew Sean Greer failed to do his homework regarding part of the book while other parts are so overwritten they are definitely venturing into the "purple" and made me wince.

While Greer has invested his characters with plenty of complexity and emotion, they simply don't talk and act like people in the late 19th and early 20th century (the time setting of the book) would talk and act. This struck a very false note and caused me to put the book aside more than once.

While the missteps in characterization could have been corrected with more research, the overwritten and highly melodramatic prose is, I think, the result of a writer who simply hasn't had enough experience. That's not to say that writers should learn at the expense of readers. They shouldn't. They should know what they're doing before attempting to publish a book.

That said, THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI, while having some faults, is still a book that is highly original without resorting to "gimmicks," is complex enough to hold an intelligent reader's interest and, most of all contains a theme that is relevant to almost every human being alive. THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI has its faults, but at its heart, it's a very human, and often very touching, book.

I would recommend THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI to anyone who is interested in something very different and who can tolerate the book's faults. For those of you who have stacks and stacks of books waiting to be read, I would skip this one and wait for Greer's next book. Perhaps by then he'll have his prose under control.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderfully Written, Engaging Book!
Review: My background is mathematics and I bought the book because the premise, a man aging physically in reverse, sounded interesting. I am not a fan of love stories but you can't help being pulled into the life of the main character, Max Tivoli by the wonderful prose. Mr. Greer's writing style is elegant and thought provoking. Even if this book didn't have an engaging plot detailing the irony and frustration of Max's life in reverse, the writing is outstanding and worth a read in its own right. I highly recommend it and am going to search out other works by this very talented writer.

Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: Not just a book, or a story, "Max Tivoli" is a small miracle. You enter the story as one might fall down the rabbit hole, or walk through the mirror. This is great literature, a spellbinding tale that will brings tears of wonder, of joy, and of sadness. Like on a magic carpet, Andrew Greer whisks you along on his ride through time and space, none of which seems quite familiar, yet all of which is at home in the heart. I cried at the end. Not only because of the many heartbreaking stories told in the book, but also because I had finished reading it.

Rating:
Summary: "Be what they think you are."
Review: Once in a while a novel comes along where all the different facets come together to produce a piece of work that is so perfect, so literary, so imaginative and just so spell-binding in tone and quality. The Confessions of Max Tivoli is indeed one of these novels. It is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination that reveals the world through the eyes of a "mooncalf, a changeling; a thing so out of joint with the human race." Max, who ages backwards from birth leads a life that manages to question the very nature of time, appearance, reality and the nature if love itself.

At the center of this heart-rending love story is Max who has the physical appearance of an old, dying creature. He bursts into the world "as if from the other end of life" and the days since are of "physical reversion" shrinking into the "hairless, harmless boy" who scrawls his pale "confession" has he approaches death as a young child. For Max everything is reversed - he's an adult when he is a child, and a boy when he is an old man. Alice Levy is the subject of Max's love and undying devotion. He falls in love with her when she is a young neighbour girl, and after a mistaken romantic encounter with Alice's Mother he loses touch with her. Each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him and towards the end of the story she gives him another chance at love under extremely unorthodox conditions. And as the story progresses Max's secrets are revealed to the reader in exceptionally clever and exciting ways.

Greer is in complete and utter control of his narrative. His use of metaphor, his ability to evoke natural conversation, his method of inserting a type of wry humor into the work, and his ability to describe San Francisco at the turn of the century, suggests that he is a complete master of the literary form. He effortlessly transports us to the suburbs of South Park and Nob Hill in the 1890's and early 1900's, and simultaneously plunges us into the world of ribboned bonnets, black sunshades; gas lit drawing rooms, and musty whorehouses. Max's incredibly tumultuous life, his relationship with his best friend Hughie, and his love of Alice all take place against the backdrop of the San Francisco earthquake, the horrors of the Great War, the flu epidemic, and the depression of the 1930's. Greer recreates a fabulous world full of rich detail, and loaded with emotion and fantasy. The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a remarkable and beautiful story, and you certainly won't be able to put it down.

Michael

Rating:
Summary: This book knocked me out!
Review: Others have given the broad contours of this fabulous work, so I shall dispense with that. I simply want to say that I was knocked out by Greer's novel. The writing was heartbreakingly beautiful, the story original, and the "metamessage" poignantly conveyed. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I am ordering his other book too.

Rating:
Summary: A Dark Tale of Doomed Love and a Doomed Life
Review: Pity poor Max Tivoli--born an old man, he becomes more youthful as time passes, instead of growing older. When, as a young man, he appears old, he cannot enjoy his youth. Then, when he is nearing death, he instead becomes an ever-shrinking version of himself. His family rejects him and his only friend is an oddity himself. The true trajedy of Max's life, according to Max, is that he loses Alice, the love of his life not once but twice. Social conventions forbid an "older" man such as himself to love the teenaged Alice, although in reality they are only a few years apart. They meet again when their apparent ages are closer, but the relationship is doomed, it has to be, just as Max's life is doomed--he knows when his life will end. This is a well-done novel--Max's time-warped life is never overly-gimmicky or silly seeming. The imagery is dark and dreary--as Max views his life. This isn't a novel I would suggest reading if you are in need of a quick pick-me-up. Rather, it is one to be read if you are in search of something a little different, a little off-center.

Rating:
Summary: textured, beautiful writing....
Review: Reviewed by Sarah Morris for Small Spiral Notebook

Much like the backward beginning of his own life, Max Tivoli starts his confessions at the end of his story, letting the reader know right away what it took him sixty years to learn: "We are each the love of someone's life." While this is the main theme of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, author Andrew Sean Greer introduces it through the intriguing concept of a man who ages in reverse. Born with the physical characteristics of a 70-year-old man, Max's body grows younger while his mind and heart age normally, growing wiser through coming-of-age experiences complicated by his extraordinary condition.

For the three lovers tangled together in Max's memoir, love is comprised of moments of brief fulfillment and stretches of empty longing. Elusive, independent, artistic, and unattainable, Alice is the love of Max's life. Max meets Alice at age 17, when he appears to be a man of 53. Throughout his life, Max puts his quest for Alice before anything else. Masking himself comes naturally to Max, and he happily becomes whatever will bring him closer to Alice. Although he confesses that "it is a brave and stupid thing," he does not deny that it is also "a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love."

In this story of an uncommon man's life, it is the "common" details that shine. Greer renders everyday experiences with a slow, precise beauty that forces readers to pause and observe the tiny miracles in the relationship between man and the world around him. Greer's descriptions of the smallest details capture moments from Max's life in poignant vignettes-a purple iris on the ground is "a frozen kiss," his devolving hands "[shrink] into tender starfish." Through his journal, Max holds his memories up to the light, pausing in his precious last moments to note the shimmering beauty of so many commonplace experiences, remarkable to him for their lack of peculiarity. The abnormality of his condition defines him, separates him from even the most mundane events in life. "Boys," he writes as he watches his young son play baseball, "you don't mean to be wonders, but you are." To Max, the most average aspect of living is a miracle.

Simultaneously mournful and worshipful, Max's ache for all he has missed underscores each page in his collected confessions. While occasionally tempered with wry humor, the longing is ever-present. The danger that this melancholy might lead to monotony is overcome by the beauty of the language itself. Max's voice throughout-so soft, so weathered, so patiently tired-pulls the reader into the pages of a journal textured throughout with the scents and sounds of faded memories. His thoughts are a parting gift to the people he loves, a farewell letter that is a privilege to read.



Rating:
Summary: Squandered premise = overstated Victorian melodrama
Review: Thank god for membruto and Elizabeth O's reviews. Like them, I really wanted to like this book. Greer poses a fantastic premise, prime with potential. But this amateurish author overdramatizes Max Tivoi's life to the point where it becomes tedious to read the novel. I would've thought it difficult for an author to go wrong with a story like this. But Greer chooses to focus on the dreary aspects of Max's situation, when there is a great deal of humor to be explored as well. How is it that Greer couldn't find ANYTHING funny about a 5 year old kid who looks like he's a tiny 70-year-old man?? Regardless of how difficult life is, there is always humor and hope to be found--unless you're Max Tivoli. It seems as if Greer attempts to position his book as a tragic love story--Max pursues the same woman throughout his life, which places him in the unique position of being father, husband, and son to her. A tantalizing idea, sure--but when Max comments, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love," he, and Greer, think too highly of the character's limited experience. Loving only one person for an entire lifetime (there's NO mention of love for any other woman or character) is both unrealistic and pathetic. Isn't life is made richer by not only the fact that we love, but also by how much and how often we love? It's naive to position Max as a tragic romantic figure when he is so emotionally-handicapped that his entire life is defined by his love for one woman, leaving no love for his mother, sister, or devoted best friend, Hughie.

In lamenting Max Tivoli's tragic circumstances, Greer created such a cold, empty character that I could not bring myself to identify or care about him. I think most reviewers of the book are dazzled by the author's writing style--and admittedly, his command of the English language is commendable (though hardly remarkable). But the story he tells lacks breadth, color, depth, and life. I feel this story would have been handled so much better by a well-rounded, thoughtful writer like John Irving or Michael Chabon. And it actually makes me sad that an author like Irving or Chabon didn't tackle this premise, that Greer took on more than he could handle. This really should've have been a fantastic, wonderful, enduring, provoking story, worthy of the reviews here. But it fell sadly short of the hype, and I would only recommend you read this book if you want an example of how to ruin a good story.

You'll have to excuse me now while I turn to Irving's Owen Meany and Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for respite from this poor example of an epic story.

Rating:
Summary: Keep reading. Max sneaks up on you and grabs you good
Review: The Book Lust lady says to subtract your age from 100 and if you're not engaged in a book after than many pages, set it aside and start another one: there are too many books one must read to waste time reading one you just can't get into.
Well, if I'd followed that advice, I'd have quit reading Max Tivoli at about page 40. I loved the writing, but I thought the story idea (a child who ages chronologically with regard to emotions and mental capacity, but who lives life in reverse: born old, he becomes progressively younger and is destined to die as an infant in 1941) far too contrived and ridiculous to hold my attention thru a whole book. It smacked of sci-fi, a genre which I don't read.
I was wrong. On approximately page 41, I was captivated and held in thrall thru the rest of the book - and sobbed sloppy tears at the end.
Max falls in love at about 16 (when he looks like an elderly man) with 14yo Alice - and she is destined to be his lifelong love. Alice becomes his wife when they are both in their 30s, and it's the only time in his life that Max's real age and apparent age are in synch. But the marriage ends and they go their separate ways. Then, 20 yrs later when Max appears to be a boy of about 12, circumstances arrange for Max to become Alice's son and the brother of his own son.
Throughout this convoluted tale is Max's lifelong friend, Hughie, who sees thru to who Max really is and accepts him as just Max - but there's more, much, much more to this story. The meaning of the memorable first line, We are each the love of someone's life, becomes crystal clear about ¾ thru the book, and then it's repeated again just a few pages from the end, just in case you somehow missed it. A simple chronicle of the events in this book does not begin to do justice to the brilliance of the writing, the heartbreak of Max's situation, and the beauty of the awkward, delicate relationships - hinted at in that opening line - which must be kept in perfect balance for this all to work.
And it does, oh how well it does.
Don't miss it. And if, like me, you're not in love after 40 pages, just trust me: Keep reading.