The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

Today Show Book Club PickAn extraordinarily haunting love story told in the voice of a man who appears to age backwardsWe 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 Andrew Sean Greers 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.