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. Sitting in a sandbox, Max Tivoli is writing the story of his life. He is nearly seventy years old, but he looks as if he is only seven - for Max is ageing backwards. The tragedy of Max's life is that he falls in love when he is seventeen with Alice, a girl his own age - but to her he looks like a middle-aged man, and when he makes advances, she is repulsed. But when he is thirty-five, ...
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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. Sitting in a sandbox, Max Tivoli is writing the story of his life. He is nearly seventy years old, but he looks as if he is only seven - for Max is ageing backwards. The tragedy of Max's life is that he falls in love when he is seventeen with Alice, a girl his own age - but to her he looks like a middle-aged man, and when he makes advances, she is repulsed. But when he is thirty-five, he actually looks his age, so he has a second chance at love - but tragedy befalls this star-crossed couple and desperate measures are required. Set in San Francisco during the turbulent years at the turn of the twentieth century, this is a haunting tale of love lost, then found - in ways that are least expected.
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Seller's Description:
Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine.
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Seller's Description:
Good. No Jacket. 267 pages (complete). Pre-publication copy. A tight, neat, tidy book. The cover is clear. There is evidence of usage about the corners, edges and papertrims. The binding is strong. Inside, the pages are fresh, bright, very clean, very sure. fk.
It's not often we get a second chance at something important, but protagonist Max Tivoli, born in the latter half of the 19th century, gets three tries at Alice, the love of his life, first as a stand-in for her deceased father, then as her husband, and finally as her adopted son. This is because Max has an exceedingly rare condition: his body ages backwards. Max's obsession with Alice and his desire to keep his secret obliterate everything else in his life. Family, friends, other lovers, the idea that he might do something with the time allotted to him than pursue this one woman, and many of his other needs, all must suffer to make room for the one insatiable need to be with Alice.
Greer does veer into melodrama and purplish prose in his account of how wisdom is not necessarily granted to anyone by default, no matter what their experience of the world, but this is a first-person account and so we are experiencing Max's sentimentality, Max's oddly apolitical soul, and Max's simplistic and sometimes blind approach to life. Some of Greer's writing is absolutely beautiful and moving, literature in the best sense, and a little will make you cringe, but that may be the intended effect.
