The Confessions of Max Tivoli

The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer tells the life story of Max Tivoli.

Max was unique in that he was born into the body of an old man and physically aged backwards though his mental development moved normally in time.

This is an interesting tale told at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th.

I like this story for it's uniqueness. And it finished it feeling like my mind had a new concept to wrap it's self around.

I found myself occasionally debating putting the book down because I wasn't in love with the story itself. The love of Max's life, Alice, gets to be a little tedious. But curiosity won out and I read the entire story. The end is sad and not quite what I expected. The character I most enjoyed was actually Max's best friend Hughie. I walk away from the book wishing I knew a little bit more about him.

Good lines from the story:

•“Love…, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.” Marcel Proust

•“We are each the love of someone’s life.” opening sentence in book.

•“It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another’s heart.”

•“The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.”

•“It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.”