Confessions

Book Review Numero Dos!

Book: The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 4.5 (on a scale of 1-10)



This book was interesting. It was well written - I appreciated the wide vocabulary of the author (Andrew Sean Geer) and the writing style, although at times it seems overly drawn out. It was written in a fairly eloquent way, however because of that, often tended towards wordiness. The story itself was sad and left the reader (well, this reader, haha) with a melancholy feeling. The storyline follows a man named Max Tivoli (who later goes by the name Asgar Van Daler). This man *spoiler alert* is a man who is born as a old man and ages oppositely throughout his life. Make sense? No? Yeah...didn't make sense to me at first either. Literally he is born as an old man...and gets progressively younger throughout the book. When he is 17 he falls in love with a 14 year old girl...although it seems much creepier than that because his interaction with her is one of an old man (even though he is 17, to the world he is 70) and a young girl. More or less the rest of the story follows this young man's desire for the girl (Alice) and how his "age disorder" affects his lust (I would say love...at one point *spoiler alert* he does marry her and they don't stay together). Max Tivoli lives a backwards life in which his family is embarassed of him, his father leaves him, he is obsessed with a teenage girl, his wife leaves him, and in the end he ends his own life - rather than degenerate into an infant for the final years of his life. What are Max Tivoli's confessions? The confessions of his life, what it really was, and who he really was. Virtually no one, save his only friend Hughie and his mother, ever knew you Max really was, or believe who he was. This book is bitter (and not sweet at all!). It was an interesting read, but I have to admit that I kept hoping Max would be able to tell the truth to the only person he loved and they would live happily ever after...too much Disney in my life I guess, ;)

I'd recommend it only if you unlimited reading time on your hands..otherwise, look for something a little more worth your time and with a better message to it's reading.