Andrew Sean Greer: "The Amazing Story of Max Tivoli"
The book
At the end of the 19th century, a boy was born in San Francisco with a mysterious illness. Max? Trains resemble those of a 70-year-old. Its development runs backwards. The drama of his existence, however, only becomes clear to him when he falls in love with Alice's 14-year-old neighbor's daughter when she is 17. Because he is outwardly an old man. Alice, on the other hand, feels to Max? best friend Hughie, the only one who knows the secret. Hughie loves Max. A love triangle, as strange as the puzzle about Max? Birth, takes its course. Only in the middle of their life, when they are outwardly equal, Max and Alice get a second chance.
Melancholic and humorous at the same time, Andrew Sean Greer tells of a lifelong love that mostly consists of hope and waiting.
The author
Andrew Sean Greer was born in 1970 in Washington D.C. He studied creative writing and lived for several years as an unsuccessful TV writer in New York. Later he moved to San Francisco and published his first narrative volume in 2000. "The amazing story of Max Tivoli" was sold in 22 countries after its release in 2004. Andrew Sean Greer lives in San Francisco and New York today. Most recently his novel "History of a Marriage" was published.
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Leseprobe "The amazing story of Max Tivoli"
April 25, 1930 Each of us is the love of another's life. I would like to point this out in the event that I am discovered and can not bring these pages to an end, in case you burn everything with horror over my confession and the happenings, even before I come to you, from murder and to report great love. I could not blame you. There is so much that speaks against a person ever hearing my story. And after all, it is necessary to explain a corpse. A thrice loved woman. The betrayal of a friend. And the long search for a boy. So let me start with the conclusion right away and tell you that each one of us is the love in someone else's life.
I'm sitting here on a beautiful April day. Everything turns to me; the sun draws deep shadows behind the children and trees and erases them again, barely a cloud is opening. The grass fills with gold, then it breaks down to nothing. The whole schoolyard is splashed and sprinkled with sun, until everything shines with sublime beauty and it takes my breath away to attend the spectacle. Nobody else cares. The little girls are sitting in a circle, their clothes crackle with strength and secrecy, the boys are either in the baseball field or hang headlong in the trees. In the sky above, a plane amazes me with its roar and brave chalk. An airplane; this is no longer the heaven that I once knew.
And I'm sitting in a sandbox, a man of almost sixty years. It's fresh and the sand is tight, the smaller kids can barely dig, besides, the chasing light is too tempting and everybody storms for shade, so I'm undisturbed.
Let's begin with apologies: for the lobbed pages you hold in your hands, a sad relic for my story and not tear-proof, but I could not capture anything better. For the theft, both of the notebooks as well as the magnificent fountain pen with which I write, which I admired for so many months on the desk of my teacher and which I simply had to bring to me. For the sand between the sides, which could not be avoided. Sure, there are worse offenses, a lost family, a betrayal and the many lies that have brought me here in this sandbox, and I ask for forgiveness for one last thing: My childlike handwriting.
We all hate what happens to us. I'm not the only one; I saw women in restaurants staring into the mirror when their husbands apologized for a moment, women in the spell of their self when they saw someone they did not recognize. I saw warriors blink in shop windows as they felt the skulls under their scalp. They had thought they could escape the worst of their youth and win the best of their age, but time swept over them and buried their hopes in the sand. My story is very different, but in the end it comes out the same.
One of the reasons I sit here in the sand and hate what has become of me is the boy.Such a long time, such a long search, the many lies I had to serve bureaucrats and pastors to learn the names of the kids in the city and the suburbs, invent silly code names, tears in a motel room, and the question if I would ever find you You were well hidden. How the young prince in the fairy tale is hidden from the ogre: in a hollow tree trunk, in a thorn thicket, in a barren place without magic. Little, hidden Sammy. But the ogre always finds the child, right? Because there you are.
If you read this, dear Sammy, do not despise me. I am a poor old man; I never wanted to hurt you. Please do not just remember me as a child's fright, even though I was. I lay in your room at night and heard your harsh breath in the dark. I whispered in your ear while you were dreaming. I am what my father has always called me? a freak, a monster ?, and while I write these lines (forgive), I watch you.
You're the one who plays baseball with his friends while the light in your golden hair comes and goes. The tanned man, unmistakably the leader whom the other boys growl and whom they love; It's good to see how much they love you. You stand at the stroke, but raise your hand, because something bothers you: an itch, maybe, because now you go to your neck rough in the hair, and then, after this sudden Koller, you call loud and are back at play.
You boys, you are a miracle without any effort. You do not notice me. Why should you? For me, I'm just the friend in the sandbox, who scrawls in front of him. Let's see: I wave to you. There, you see, now you briefly support the bat and wave back, on your freckled face a cheeky grin, overbearing, but totally unaware. How many years, how much effort it took me to get here. You know nothing, you do not suspect anything. When you look at me, you see a boy like yourself. A boy, yes, that's me. I owe so many explanations, but first of all, believe me
In this wretched body I am getting old in mind and soul. But on the outside I am getting young. There is no name for what I am. Doctors do not understand it; my cells are fumbling around under the microscope, sharing and doubling their ignorance. But I see myself as an ancient curse. The same with which Hamlet considered Polonius before he impaled the old man, that he crawls "backwards like a crab", always backwards. Finally, as I write this, I look like a twelve-year-old boy. At almost sixty, I have sand on my pants and dirt on my cap. My laugh is fresh as an apple bite. And yet I have been considered a youth of twenty-two, with a rifle and gas mask. Before that, for a man in his mid-thirties who sought his love in the earthquake. A hard-working forty-year-old, an anxious fifty-year-old, and older and older, the closer we get to my birth.
"Anyone can grow old," my father liked to say from the bouquet of his cigars. But I burst into the world as from the other end of life, and the days since were those of physical reversal, dimming crow's feet, the darkening of the white and then gray hair, the muscular arms and rosy-rejuvenating skin, the shooting up and then shrinking again to the beardless, harmless boy who scribbles this pale confession.
A lunar calf, a changeling, beaten out of the human race that I've been standing on the street, hated every man in love, every widow in black, every child dragged behind by a devoted dog.
Ginbeduselt I have cursed and spat on strangers, who took me for the opposite of what I was inside? for an adult the child, for a schoolboy the old man that I am now. I've learned what compassion means and I'm sorry for people a little bit because I know better than anyone else what's in store for them.
