About this item
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 someones life.. So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Maxs 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 mans 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, Maxs 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, 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.
About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer. He is the bestselling author of , which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and , which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award. The child of two scientists, Greer studied writing with Robert Coover and Edmund White at Brown University, where he was the commencement speaker at his own graduation, where his unrehearsed remarks, critiquing Brown's admissions policies, caused a semi-riot. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, theater tech, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he received his Master of Fine Arts from The University of Montana, from where he soon moved to Seattle and two years later to San Francisco where he now lives. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center. He is an identical twin. While in San Francisco, he began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His stories have appeared in and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in , and . His first novel, , was published in 2001.
