Rating: 
Summary: "Be what they think you are."
Review: Once in a while a novel comes along where all the different facets come together to produce a piece of work that is so perfect, so literary, so imaginative and just so spell-binding in tone and quality. The Confessions of Max Tivoli is indeed one of these novels. It is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination that reveals the world through the eyes of a "mooncalf, a changeling; a thing so out of joint with the human race." Max, who ages backwards from birth leads a life that manages to question the very nature of time, appearance, reality and the nature if love itself. At the center of this heart-rending love story is Max who has the physical appearance of an old, dying creature. He bursts into the world "as if from the other end of life" and the days since are of "physical reversion" shrinking into the "hairless, harmless boy" who scrawls his pale "confession" has he approaches death as a young child. For Max everything is reversed - he's an adult when he is a child, and a boy when he is an old man. Alice Levy is the subject of Max's love and undying devotion. He falls in love with her when she is a young neighbour girl, and after a mistaken romantic encounter with Alice's Mother he loses touch with her. Each successive time he finds his Alice, she does not recognize him and towards the end of the story she gives him another chance at love under extremely unorthodox conditions. And as the story progresses Max's secrets are revealed to the reader in exceptionally clever and exciting ways. Greer is in complete and utter control of his narrative. His use of metaphor, his ability to evoke natural conversation, his method of inserting a type of wry humor into the work, and his ability to describe San Francisco at the turn of the century, suggests that he is a complete master of the literary form. He effortlessly transports us to the suburbs of South Park and Nob Hill in the 1890's and early 1900's, and simultaneously plunges us into the world of ribboned bonnets, black sunshades; gas lit drawing rooms, and musty whorehouses. Max's incredibly tumultuous life, his relationship with his best friend Hughie, and his love of Alice all take place against the backdrop of the San Francisco earthquake, the horrors of the Great War, the flu epidemic, and the depression of the 1930's. Greer recreates a fabulous world full of rich detail, and loaded with emotion and fantasy. The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a remarkable and beautiful story, and you certainly won't be able to put it down. Michael
Rating:
Summary: This book knocked me out!
Review: Others have given the broad contours of this fabulous work, so I shall dispense with that. I simply want to say that I was knocked out by Greer's novel. The writing was heartbreakingly beautiful, the story original, and the "metamessage" poignantly conveyed. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I am ordering his other book too.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dark Tale of Doomed Love and a Doomed Life
Review: Pity poor Max Tivoli--born an old man, he becomes more youthful as time passes, instead of growing older. When, as a young man, he appears old, he cannot enjoy his youth. Then, when he is nearing death, he instead becomes an ever-shrinking version of himself. His family rejects him and his only friend is an oddity himself. The true trajedy of Max's life, according to Max, is that he loses Alice, the love of his life not once but twice. Social conventions forbid an "older" man such as himself to love the teenaged Alice, although in reality they are only a few years apart. They meet again when their apparent ages are closer, but the relationship is doomed, it has to be, just as Max's life is doomed--he knows when his life will end. This is a well-done novel--Max's time-warped life is never overly-gimmicky or silly seeming. The imagery is dark and dreary--as Max views his life. This isn't a novel I would suggest reading if you are in need of a quick pick-me-up. Rather, it is one to be read if you are in search of something a little different, a little off-center.
Rating:
Summary: textured, beautiful writing....
Review: Reviewed by Sarah Morris for Small Spiral Notebook
Much like the backward beginning of his own life, Max Tivoli starts his confessions at the end of his story, letting the reader know right away what it took him sixty years to learn: "We are each the love of someone's life." While this is the main theme of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, author Andrew Sean Greer introduces it through the intriguing concept of a man who ages in reverse. Born with the physical characteristics of a 70-year-old man, Max's body grows younger while his mind and heart age normally, growing wiser through coming-of-age experiences complicated by his extraordinary condition.
For the three lovers tangled together in Max's memoir, love is comprised of moments of brief fulfillment and stretches of empty longing. Elusive, independent, artistic, and unattainable, Alice is the love of Max's life. Max meets Alice at age 17, when he appears to be a man of 53. Throughout his life, Max puts his quest for Alice before anything else. Masking himself comes naturally to Max, and he happily becomes whatever will bring him closer to Alice. Although he confesses that "it is a brave and stupid thing," he does not deny that it is also "a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love."
In this story of an uncommon man's life, it is the "common" details that shine. Greer renders everyday experiences with a slow, precise beauty that forces readers to pause and observe the tiny miracles in the relationship between man and the world around him. Greer's descriptions of the smallest details capture moments from Max's life in poignant vignettes-a purple iris on the ground is "a frozen kiss," his devolving hands "[shrink] into tender starfish." Through his journal, Max holds his memories up to the light, pausing in his precious last moments to note the shimmering beauty of so many commonplace experiences, remarkable to him for their lack of peculiarity. The abnormality of his condition defines him, separates him from even the most mundane events in life. "Boys," he writes as he watches his young son play baseball, "you don't mean to be wonders, but you are." To Max, the most average aspect of living is a miracle.
Simultaneously mournful and worshipful, Max's ache for all he has missed underscores each page in his collected confessions. While occasionally tempered with wry humor, the longing is ever-present. The danger that this melancholy might lead to monotony is overcome by the beauty of the language itself. Max's voice throughout-so soft, so weathered, so patiently tired-pulls the reader into the pages of a journal textured throughout with the scents and sounds of faded memories. His thoughts are a parting gift to the people he loves, a farewell letter that is a privilege to read.
Rating:
Summary: Keep reading. Max sneaks up on you and grabs you good
Review: The Book Lust lady says to subtract your age from 100 and if you're not engaged in a book after than many pages, set it aside and start another one: there are too many books one must read to waste time reading one you just can't get into.
Well, if I'd followed that advice, I'd have quit reading Max Tivoli at about page 40. I loved the writing, but I thought the story idea (a child who ages chronologically with regard to emotions and mental capacity, but who lives life in reverse: born old, he becomes progressively younger and is destined to die as an infant in 1941) far too contrived and ridiculous to hold my attention thru a whole book. It smacked of sci-fi, a genre which I don't read.
I was wrong. On approximately page 41, I was captivated and held in thrall thru the rest of the book - and sobbed sloppy tears at the end.
Max falls in love at about 16 (when he looks like an elderly man) with 14yo Alice - and she is destined to be his lifelong love. Alice becomes his wife when they are both in their 30s, and it's the only time in his life that Max's real age and apparent age are in synch. But the marriage ends and they go their separate ways. Then, 20 yrs later when Max appears to be a boy of about 12, circumstances arrange for Max to become Alice's son and the brother of his own son.
Throughout this convoluted tale is Max's lifelong friend, Hughie, who sees thru to who Max really is and accepts him as just Max - but there's more, much, much more to this story. The meaning of the memorable first line, We are each the love of someone's life, becomes crystal clear about ¾ thru the book, and then it's repeated again just a few pages from the end, just in case you somehow missed it. A simple chronicle of the events in this book does not begin to do justice to the brilliance of the writing, the heartbreak of Max's situation, and the beauty of the awkward, delicate relationships - hinted at in that opening line - which must be kept in perfect balance for this all to work.
And it does, oh how well it does.
Don't miss it. And if, like me, you're not in love after 40 pages, just trust me: Keep reading.
Rating:
Summary: My Confessions About Max Tivoli
Review: The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer, is a book I first heard about one morning on The Today Show. After hearing the intriguing premise of the story, about a man who internally ages like the rest of us while his body does the exact opposite, I just had to read it right away. I had no idea the kind of impact the book would have on me, however. Max, born an infant-sized old man at birth, and growing bigger, but younger, physically as he ages, is an outsider, a misfit, a freak who finds himself never really fitting in. Encouraged at a young age to be who others perceive him to be, he spends most of his life living a lie. I've never had to live a lie, but I know what it's like to be and feel different, having to accept the realization that this state will never change. Max, despite his flaws, is a good man desperately trying to carve out a good life for himself as he spends most of it pining over his one true love, Alice. The story takes place in the late 1800's and early 1900s in the city of San Francisco. Greer does a tremendous job of dropping us into this world from page one and weaves a poetic tale of life, love, and loss that somehow manages blend humor, sadness, and enchantment in a way that will make you never want to put the book down once you pick it up. You'll find yourself loving Max, sympathizing for him, even rooting for him when he finally gets the chance to win over his beloved Alice. And yet, despite the overall tale being a sad and tragic one, you'll never find yourself pitying or hating Max for some of the harsh choices he makes along the way. In fact, if you're anything like me, at times you'll find yourself identifying with this character all too well. And that's truly what great fiction is all about, isn't it?
Rating:
Summary: "Be what they think you are."
Review: These words are the Rule given the strange main character by his mother as a means of survival. THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI is surely one of the most beautifully creative and poetic novels in contemporary literature. Author Andrew Sean Greer not only has an imagination for unorthodox characters and tales: he has the gift to write his idiiosyncratic novel in words that surpass prose to become poetry. This is clearly one of the great novels of the 21st century and serves to feed our appetites for more from this artist.
A creative twist to the memoirs of an old man reflecting on his youth as he lays dying, THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI sets that construct in reverse. Born in 1871 to a family of means in San Francisco, Max Tivoli is an aberrant creature, an infant born in the reverse of time, occupying the physical characteristics of an old man, destined to live his life backwards until he dies in 1941 in the form of an infant. In his bizarre life he meets the one woman he will love throughout his span of time on earth, first as a child (to his elderly appearing body) through his first sexual encounter with Alice's mother (more age appearance appropriate), his courtship and marriage and eventual loss of his wandering Alice in the reaction to the great earthquake of San Francisco and her mother's needs in Pasadena. Alice marries multiple times and between marriages has a reunion with Max and conceives a male child. Max Tivoli goes through changes in names as well as changes in physical appearance and follows his beloved Alice across America were as a youth he is ultimately adopted by Alice and lives with his own son Sammy in the form of a smaller brother.
Max's only constant through his life is his childhood friend Hughie who ages normally as Max ages in reverse. It is this tender relationship thqat carries the book through to its tender conclusion. And though some who have not read this miraculous little novel may find this explanation redolent of science fiction or some other incarnation of the tawdry, it is the language of the author that not only carries the tale with care but with some of the most simply perfect writing today. "Death makes children of us all; I learned this in the war." "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love." "As for that new identity, Asgar Van Daler. Well, I was no stranger to playing a part that did not belong to me. A father, for instance, my young father standing fresh and smiling in the pleasure gardens of his youth, watching the girls and tossing rye bread to the swans, my Danish father in those happy years before he changed his name. Asgar Van Daler. This inheritance was always mine to claim. After all, I do live life backwards as a saint; like all the beatified, I consider it my duty to restore the world its losses."
Andrew Sean Greer. Watch for this next novel. But in the meantime read this one slowly, like sipping a fine wine. This is treasureable writing. Grady Harp, February 2005
Rating:
Summary: heartbreaking, astounding, amazing book
Review: This book is mesmerizing. I found it almost impossible to put down...from the start of Max's life, through the end of the book where he is an old man in the body of a child, I found myself compelled to keep turning the pages, despite the real world demands around me. When I finished the book, and closed the back cover, I found myself clutching the book to my chest and weeping...so incredibly well told is the story. I loved Max, and hated to see his story end. The details of history and the imagery of the setting are evocative and flawless. The plot is smooth and it's termination is both shocking and understandable. To discuss the details of the plot does the writer and future reader a disservice, so well crafted is the blending of the story that to give away the ending to someone who hasn't read the book is almost unforgivable. I can't say enough good things about this book. As American novels go...this may very well be one of the great ones. Months after reading it, I still get emotional about it. I loved this book, and eagerly anticipate reading the rest of Mr. Greer's work.
Rating: 
Summary: Deadly
Review: This book reeks like old lavender sachet: musty, over-sweet, miasmal in its vagueness. Greer's obsessive images are all of moonlight, fog, dew, star-spangles, voices heard from another room or a distant street: everything that is impalpable, evanescent and indistinct. Those of us who believe that there is a real world and who enjoy the sensation of grasping it may be repelled by the sickly anemia of such writing. Shelley, at least, had wit and urbanity; while Keats had a richly sensuous apprehension of the natural world. Greer has neither: his sentimentality yearns for and purchases nothing but death. His characters are as ill-defined as his prose and uninteresting to boot. The titular hero has no personality: he merely ages backwards and loves the same woman all his life. For Greer, that is all we need to know, but he's wrong: Max is dull. So is Hughie, who has even less individuality; so too is Alice, Max's lifelong love, who is characterized by residual Jewishness, proto-feminism and nothing else. These "people" are as blurry as the sepia-drowned images in a poorly preserved daguerrotype. At key points in the novel characters desert their loving, inoffensive families in order to begin new lives in distant climes. A husband and father vanishes, never to be seen again, leaving his pregnant wife and teenaged son in straitened circumstances. A wife walks out on her adoring and supportive husband without informing him that she is carrying their child, fully intending that he will never find either of them. Of course, these are monstrously cruel and selfish acts; yet neither Greer-Max nor any of the other characters offer a word of reproach. The novel seems to regard these desertions as a justified form of personal truth. Ties of blood, faith and love must be ruthlessly swept aside in favor of the sacred right of self-reinvention. This, too, is a deeply sentimental, profoundly immature view of life; but what else can one expect from an author whose hero grows more and more childish with every passing year?
Rating:
Summary: We are Each the love of someones life
Review: This has fast become my favorite book of all time. A spot that normally is held for many years before a new book takes its place. However, not in this case. A few days before I had finished a book I was sure would be in the number one spot for a long time. Then my friend handed me The Confessions of Max Tivoli. By the first line, I was held and could not put it down. I was reading it in all my classes, much to the distain of my teachers. Max Tivoli is a character so great I cannot put it into words. He held my heart with a death grip as I read his heartbreaking story. All the characters, big and small, now hold a place in my heart. I cried for hours after finishing this book, I had stayed home from school just so I could read to the very last page without interruption.
The first line of this book is now my favorite quote; one man questioned it and received a death glare from me. This book proves that we are indeed the love of someone's life and I feel it is one that everyone should read in their life.
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