The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Greer, Andrew Sean

ISBN 10: 0374128715 / ISBN 13: 9780374128715

Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, NY, 2004

About this Item

New York, NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000. First edition, first printing. Tan quarter cloth over tan boards with gilt lettering and decoration embossed on front board and spine, 267 pp. Fine in a near fine dust jacket, protected by a mylar cover.

Seller Inventory # EM-B1266-12

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Confessions of Max Tivoli
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, NY
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374128715
• ISBN 13: 9780374128715
• Binding: Quarter Cloth
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature and Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

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. 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, 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 Authors

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the story collection How it Was For Me (Picador) and most recently a novel, The Path of Minor Planets (Picador). He lives in San Francisco, California.

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the story collection How it Was For Me (Picador) and most recently a novel, The Path of Minor Planets (Picador). He lives in San Francisco, California.