The Confessions of Max Tivoli [Paperback]

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

There is no great availability of literary fiction in a fantastic setting, so this novel is a clear break from the ordinary. It all revolves around the narrator, Max Tivoli, who was born with the appearance of a seventy-year old man and is "doomed" to have his body rejuvenate while his mind grows old. The sum of the two ages will always add up to seventy, so he knows that by the year 1941 he will disappear. This special situation forces Max to hide his true self from the rest of the people and he tries to stick by his mother's advice: "Be what they think you are". Only a few times in his life he actually ventures to reveal his reality; probably the most important one is when he is a kid in an old man's body and meets Hughie, a child that will become his best friend for life and will share his experiences, regrets and pain, in the years to come.

And then there is Alice, a girl / woman that will cross Max's path three times in his life at different points and who is the love of his life. It is impressive to see how each of this encounters differ from one another, since even though both characters have the same age, Max's physical appearance suggests otherwise. This dichotomy in Max's life creates complex situations that help us realize what this man has to go through. An example of this is when Max meets Alice and both of them are seventeen, but it is Alice's mother who sees Max as a worthy candidate for herself, instead of for her daughter.

George Bernard Shaw once said "Youth is wasted on the young", and the author explores what would happen if that was not the case, but only for one of us. The result of exploring this topic is a novel written in excellent style and which several times in its course leaves us thinking, with our mouth open after being surprised by implications we had not considered. The setting is mostly San Francisco in the turn of the century, and the author provides the city with a life of its own, giving the story a very special flavor. I highly recommend this work to all those that like literature that makes you think and / or fantastic settings.