The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
This book is excellent. I haven’t felt this emotional about a book since I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. May I tell you that I actually ended the book in tears. It’s perhaps one of the saddest stories to ever be created. Max is a person who ages in reverse, which is to say that he is born as a very old man. He actually emerges into this world, birthed from his mother, with the body of a seventy year old man (use suspension of disbelief here). In his 70 year old childhood, he befriends a boy named Hughie who has been alive for the same number of years but is a normal boy. Throughout these memoirs, Max recounts how as he himself decreased in age to become the adolescent boy he is while writing his life’s history, Hughie increased in the normal aging process to be the older man. Hughie is the closest person to Max, becoming even closer to Max than his mother who advised him at a very early age (when he was still in the body of an elderly man) that he needs to: “Be who they think you are.” Hughie is the only non-relative who knows who Max really is, accepts him, and recognizes him first as an older man, then an aging gentleman, then a middle aged man, followed by a strapping lad who actually tries to go to college and enlist in a war. (Max writes his life’s memoirs in the back of his school room)
There is some interesting history in here as well. The book begins before the turn of the century and ends in 1930. It takes place in San Francisco, where the author Andrew Sean Greer is also from, and Max actually recounts the Quake of 1906. But ultimately, this is the personal story of a man who comes to regard himself as a monster and who cannot fully come to terms with his life and who he is and I found I couldn’t put it down. I read it at the gym, on the el, in the shower. So it’s a bit water logged but I had to see how it ended!
for more with a spoiler…
Max also tells the tragic story of the lost love of his life, who he loses again and again as he gets successively younger. It’s so painful and heart wrenching of a story that you feel like Greer is actually twisting a knife blade inside you. That’s how good it is.
And in the end, supposing that this is a confession Greer merely came upon and then edited before publishing, the following author’s note is made:
This work is reprinted almost exactly as it was found in an attic in 1947. Some errors, such as spelling and punctuation, have been corrected, some illegible words (such as in the thunderstorm passage) have been deduced from context, but errors of history, geography, and medicine have been allowed to remain. Printed by permission of the Samuel Harper Foundation.
I must admit, I sat there stunned at the book’s finish line and, sitting in a puddle of tears for a moment thought, “Could it possibly all be true?”