Confessions of Max Tivoli

author
Andrew Sean Greer

plot synopsis in 50 words or fewer
When Max Tivoli is born, he looks like a seventy year old man. Literally. As Max ages his body physiologically grows younger as his mind matures. Besides knowing the year that he's going to die, Max is forced to negotiate his interatctions with most people according to his external age. One of the strangest love stories ever told.

what really matters
The clarity of emotion that his characters, particularly, Max and his leading lady, Alice, display. Written with a steady hand.

how the book aptly begins
"We are each the love of someone's life.

I wanted to put that down in case I am discovered and unable to complete these pages, in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder. I would not blame you. So many things stand in the way of anyone ever hearing my story. There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for. So I will get to the end first and tell you we are each the love of someone's life."

some of the hype
"Resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing....Enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov."
—John Updike, The New Yorker

"Max may be a monster, but he is a profoundly human one, a creature whose unusual disorder, far from making him a freak to be wondered at, simply magnifies his normal and recognizable emotions, sharpening their poignancy."
—Gary Krist, The New York Times Book Review

"[T]he delights are many, among them gossamer prose, vivid characterization, and historic snapshots of a fabulous American city. Old-fashioned narrative fun in a literary hall of mirrors."
—Kirkus Reviews

some other things this author has written
How It Was For Me: Stories
The Path of Minor Planets
The Story of a Marriage