From the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Less comes Andrew Sean Greer's extraordinarily haunting love story
The Confessions of Max Tivoli, **told in the voice of a man who
appears to age backwards.
**
A Today Show Book Club Pick
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. But his
curse is also his blessing: as he gets older, his body grows younger, so
each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him. She
takes him for a stranger, and Max is given another chance at love.
Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the
twentieth century, Max's life and confessions question the very nature
of time, of appearance and reality, and of love itself. A beautiful and
daring feat of the imagination, Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of
Max Tivoli reveals the world through the eyes of a monster, a being who
confounds the very certainties by which we live and in doing so embodies
in extremis what it means to be human.
