Rating: 
Summary: culmination of boyd's awesome career
Review: this novel is so brilliant, so swiftly paced and poetically composed, i can hardly do it justice. i have read (and taught in university courses) Boyd's books over and over again down the years (a fav is The New Confessions) and Any Human Heart rates right up there with the best work he's done. there's a real melancholia evident here--so those who are looking for the hilarity of such early works as A Good Man in Africa or On the Yankee Station are gonna be puzzled a tad. Logan Mountstuart is a great creation...so pleased, especially as i didn't like Armadillo and The Blue Afternoon--despite the fact that, with Ian McEwan, Wm Boyd is my favorite contemporary novelist. get this as soon as you can...
Rating:
Summary: impressive
Review: This was the first book by William Boyd I read. Now I know what "compulsive reading" is. If you like travelling, meeting people, history or/and secretly want to be a writer yourself, read this book. I checked several footnotes appearing on nearly every page of the book and nearly all the given information was true. No wonder it took Mr Boyd 30 months to prepare for writing this book. I found this book very satisfying.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: What an odd book. Logan Gonzago Mountstuart was a (fictional) writer, spy, art dealer and all around rennaissance man who lived through the great events of the 20th century. This book is written as a diary, and, at first, one can find it a bit tedious, as the your Mountstuart writes clumsily about his experiences.But quickly, this book becomes almost obsessive, as Boyd draws his character with subtle strokes. I was so drawn into this book that I found it hard to put down. Being the first Boyd novel I read, I didn't know what to expect, but I'm certainly going to read others. This character's life is interesting and inspiring, and watching him rise, fall, and finally die is deeply moving.
Rating: 
Summary: I was immersed
Review: When I finished reading this book, I felt as though I really knew its main character, Logan Montstuart and I found myself missing him. As a fully realized personage, Montstuart may be right up there with Pickwick. A major diffence of course is that Montstuart endures some heartbreaking losses along the way, and these leave deep marks as he lives through each decade of the twentieth century. So much in the book rang true to me. Other reviewers have commented on the vividness of Montstuart's encounters with personages and events through the 20th century. To these remarks I can add that it makes perfect sense that a man educated in England, with a literary bent, would be skeptical of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and other luminaries of abstract expressionism (those championed by critic Clement Greenberg who also gets a mention). A decade or so later he is drawn to artists of a more narrative bent (Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg). I guess it's a sign of the breadth of Boyd's creation that you can approach this literary invention from so many angles. I am sure that British readers and those that lived through the second world war would come away with other aspects that are most striking to them. There is something exhausting about this book. Boyd takes you to so many locales and puts his protagonist in so many different situations that sometimes I found myself wishing that Montstuart would just stay put. Still, it's a rewarding read, sometimes incredibly sad but also very rich.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, but Main Character Used as a Literary Device
Review: William Boyd has fast become one of my "new" favorite authors. He seems able to write anything. He's highly comedic and witty in ARMADILLO and A GOOD MAN IN AFRICA; he's literary and serious in the brilliant BRAZZAVILLE BEACH (probably his best book to date); he's subtle in THE BLUE AFTERNOON; and in ANY HUMAN HEART, he's elegiac and poignant. ANY HUMAN HEART, however, differs from the novels I've read written by Boyd, in that it is more of a "straight narrative," without the many subplots that were part and parcel of the other books. ANY HUMAN HEART is the life story, presented through his diaries (twelve of them), of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart. Mountstuart is a man whose life spanned almost all of the twentieth century; he was born in 1906 and he lived until 1991, when he was felled by a heart attack. His diaries, however, don't begin until the year 1923. It's hard to believe that Logan Mountstuart wasn't a real person (Boyd even includes a photo purporting to "be" Mountstuart). As a writer, himself, (albeit a failed one) Mountstuart rubs shoulders with many other luminaries of the times. He meets Fitzgerald (and calls him a "pointy-faced man." He meets Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, James Joyce and Cyril Connolly. He critiques Evelyn Waugh's VILE BODIES and Waugh critiques a manuscript for Mountstuart. Picasso makes a sketch of him and he even meets King Edward VIII on a golf course in Biarritz (the forerunner of St. Tropez and Cannes) that leads to a job spying on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bahamas. Mountstuart is a man who seems, during the first part of the book, to "have it all." He's rich, he's Oxford educated, he married well and he vacations in all the "right" places. Still, there is something essential missing from his life. Mountstuart is a fatalist and while I see nothing wrong in being a fatalist, his acceptance of "playing the hand life deals him" makes him a little less wise, a little less perceptive, a little less insightful than he could have been. The final chapters, chronicling Mountstuart's final years in a French village (during which his life is far, far different) are the very best. Throughout the early years of his long life, Mountstuart was always in the "right place at the right time" and, though it may seem to readers that this tactic failed Mountstuart during the final years of his life, I think perhaps those years might have been Mountstuart's best, and richest, years of all. One of the best things about this book, and about Logan Mountstuart, is the fact that he's wrong about things as much as he is right. He completely misreads the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; he makes inane statements about the atom bomb; he misses the mark with both the poetry of T.S. Eliot and abstract painting, which he doesn't like and for which he sees no market and no future. His political opinions are dead wrong more often than they're dead on. All of this doesn't make Mountstuart a foolish man, it only serves to humanize him and make him seem far more real in the eyes of the reader. In Logan Mountstuart, we also see flashes of Boyd's comic brilliance, a brilliance he showcased so well in ARMADILLO and A GOOD MAN IN AFRICA. ANY HUMAN HEART, however, isn't a comedic book. Parts of it, especially during the second half, when Mountstuart's life takes quite a downturn, are quite dark. Mountstuart, himself, is imprisoned by the Swiss, of all people, and his second wife, believing him dead, remarries only to die soon after. This has a terrible effect on Mountstuart who suffers a nervous breakdown and a botched suicide attempt, only to enter into a third marriage and suffer yet another family death and a rape charge. He finally ends up in Africa (one of Boyd's favorite locales), but eventually makes his way to London once again, though he is now penniless and depressed. In 1979, he leaves for a small village in France and here, I think, is where Boyd has done his best writing and his most believable characterization. Perhaps in an effort to make Mountstuart as "true to life" as possible, Boyd doesn't tie up his protagonist's life neatly. There are many plot strands that enter the narrative and then just fizzle out...much as events in real life often do. In some ways, I liked this, but in other ways, I didn't. Fiction, after all, isn't real life, and we demand things in books that we don't demand in life. I also got a little tired of Mountstuart's fatalism. I sometimes found myself wishing the man would sit up, take notice and take control of life, rather than leaving his state of being up to the whims of fate. The reason I gave this book four stars instead of five is because of the lack of substance given to characterizing Mountstuart. Yes, I realize Boyd "created" Mountstuart as a device to comment on the twentieth century and the luminaries that populated it, but that didn't mean that Mountstuart, himself, had to be so flimsy. He could have been fleshed out a bit more. He could have been given a little fire and passion, about something, anything, rather than making him so much of a fatalist that he does, at times, become boring and almost transparent. Although some readers may think the title of the book was chosen because of the heart attack that ends Mountstuart's life, it wasn't. It comes from Henry James, "Never say you know the last word about any human heart." That's very good advice and I certainly didn't come to know the last word about Mountstuart in the lines of this book. Perhaps that's best, but still, I wish that Boyd had let me know his protagonist a little better, that he had created him to be more than a literary device. Despite my few misgivings, ANY HUMAN HEART is a very good book and one I would recommend to patient readers (it is a rather slow read), but it doesn't represent Boyd at his (comedic or serious) very best.
Rating:
Summary: another tour de force
Review: William Boyd is the true inheritor of Evelyn Waugh, and stands as the finest English writer alive today. (He doesn't get nearly as much attention as the likes of Martin Amis and others because he seems not to like the public eye.) This is another wonderful book, in the style of the New Confessions. While not quite as innovative as some of his other work (Brazzaville Beach, for instance), it is nonetheless an affecting book, which stays with the reader long after it has been put down. I will look forward to rereading it before not too long, and as always will eagerly await his next offering.
Rating:
Summary: another tour de force
Review: William Boyd is the true inheritor of Evelyn Waugh, and stands as the finest English writer alive today. (He doesn't get nearly as much attention as the likes of Martin Amis and others because he seems not to like the public eye.) This is another wonderful book, in the style of the New Confessions. While not quite as innovative as some of his other work (Brazzaville Beach, for instance), it is nonetheless an affecting book, which stays with the reader long after it has been put down. I will look forward to rereading it before not too long, and as always will eagerly await his next offering.
Rating:
Summary: The Fascinating and Remarkable Story of Logan Mountstuart
Review: William Boyd's latest novel, ANY HUMAN HEART, focuses on the life of Logan Mountstuart --- a writer, friend, lover and world traveler. His fascinating story is revealed through daily journal entries; his personal day-to-day writings relate his movements, thoughts and whereabouts. The journals begin with Mountstuart's boyhood in Uruguay and then move to Oxford and the publication of his first book. We next travel with him to Paris --- where he rubs shoulders with the likes of Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce --- and Spain, where he covers its civil war. During World War II, Mountstuart becomes a naval intelligence officer and befriends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (though this eventually turns sour). Following the war, he goes to New York as an art dealer, to Africa as a literature professor, to London and finally to France, where he lives out the rest of his days. All the while, we watch him grow up through his musings and his rich life, which is characterized by friends, family, drugs, lovers, artists, booze, military men, fiends and foes, happiness and sadness, triumphs and personal tragedies. It is, journal entry after entry, the entire makeup of a life fully lived. Logan Mountstuart is like Forrest Gump in a way. He is able to meet some extraordinary people and be embroiled in a number of important events. But this does not happen because of a goal or a determination to get someplace --- he just happens to be there at the time. Oh! There's Virginia Woolf again. Oh! Jackson Pollack is a charlatan. The Duchess is vindictive! Poor Hemingway, why did he have to shoot himself? Boyd brings all of these people and events into sharp focus, using a fictional character that you swear is real. Boyd does throw events and people at Mountstuart with a bit too much gusto at times. The writer thinks to himself: How can I make his life a little more interesting right now? The story is beginning to drag. Yes, okay, I'll ship him off to Nigeria during its Civil War. Hmmm, the writer muses, what funny thing can happen to an old man who has traveled the world? Of course, have him fall in with some sort of terrorist cell. All in all, however, ANY HUMAN HEART is an accomplished piece. It brings together those small, seemingly insignificant details of one's life (breakfasts, vacations, weather reports), puts them up against world events and shows how one's life slowly, perhaps imperceptibly, changes from one day to the next. I'm hungry so I'll end here. Perhaps I'll cook up some scallops and eat them outside. It's bright and sunny but a bit cold. I'll have to wear a hat. --- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley
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