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The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
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Today Show Book Club Pick An extraordinarily haunting love story told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwards 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. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. The story is told in three acts. First, young Max falls in love with a neighborhood girl, Alice, who ages as normally as any of us. Max, of course, does not; as a young man, he has an older man's body.…
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"It was preceded by the achingly mediocre – albeit academy award-nominated – film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was based on a [1922] short story by F Scott Fitzgerald. All three are about a man who ages backwards, who was born as a little old man and grows backwards towards infancy. This setup enables the main character to court the same woman twice, without her knowing it because of the change in his appearance. It is a stunningly spare and lyrical novel, that confronts issues like longing, loss and failure to connect with the people we pass along the way in life. Andy Greer is probably the greatest San Francisco novelist today. He writes in a very simple fashion, punctuated by startling turns of phrase. John Updike compared him to Nabakov in The New Yorker. There is poetry to his prose. Sometimes historical novels feel like they’re crammed with whatever the writer learned on Wikipedia. But Greer embeds historical detail in a very elegant way. He finds very specific, telling pieces of history about every age he writes about. The novel spans four or five decades. There is no exaggerated “ye olde” writing – magically, he just makes you feel like you were there."