Andrew Sean Greer’s novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli was another one of those books that, when I started reading, I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did. It has a very unusual premise: a man, victim of a rare disease, is born old and grows young, now in his late fifties, tells the story of his life, including all the intimate feelings that come with loving and being always out of sync in time and place and most important, body. At any point in his life, his actual chronological age and his apparent age always add up to seventy so that in his mid thirties, he is what he seems to be. And it is at that point that he is able to marry the same girl whom falls in love with in his teens when he appears to be an old man, and for a brief time, imagine himself to be "normal."
It is a heartbreaking love story, one in which love is always elusive. Greer begins the book with a quote: “Everyone is always the love of someone’s life.” And here the unrequited love is inspected, turned inside out, examined and washed clean with confession.
The book is also a painful examination of growing old, of learning too late. An exaggeration of the familiar phrase “youth is wasted on the young.” The book is a beautiful, meloncholy play with time and the ever present yearning for love.
Posted by leya at March 26, 2005 02:14 PM