The Confessions of Max Tivoli - Softcover

'The Confessions of Max Tivoli is enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nobokov.' John Updike, The New Yorker; Every once in a great while, a truly original voice springs up... and tells us a story unlike anything we've ever heard before.' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours; 'Andrew Sean Greer is one of the most talented writers around.' Michael Chabon; 'Here is a writer of great daring, and originality, who is not afraid of emotion. Max Tivoli may even make you cry.' Peter Carey

So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backwards - on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child. When Max is seventeen, he falls in love with a neighbour girl, Alice, who ages normally. 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 backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, Max's confessions are written in a prose that is beautifully modulated; its tale of love lost then found achieves an emotional resonance that is unforgettable.