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Loading... Any Human Heart (2002)by William Boyd
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. There's no doubt about it, Mr Boyd is a good storyteller. ( ) Any Human Heart is written as a series of journals throughout the life of the fictional character Logan Mountstuart, from his public school days in 1920s England through to his final days as an elderly man in rural France in 1991. Such is the quality of Boyd's writing, I had to double check at one point that this character was in fact definitely fictional, as he weaves in a cast of famous names as bit characters in Mountstuart's life which ebbs and flows between wealth and poverty, love and sorrow, fame and invisibility, all played out across a backdrop of fascinating locations. At it's heart it's quite a sad book, a chronicle of a life that superficially seems so have been so full yet ultimately echoes with loneliness. This should be made into a television series. The places where the story takes place include a boy's school in England, London, Paris, New York, The Bahamas, Switzerland, the South of France, Biarritz, Nigeria. One episode for each of those. I don't mean to sound dismissive. I quite enjoyed reading the book, even though at the start I thought, hmmm, a teenage boy and his friends at an English boarding school ... I don't think I'm going to like this. But I did like it. And if they make a series out of it, I'll be watching. This is the third well-written book I've read recently; one of those was really beautifully written -- well-chosen words, wonderfully constructed story. Sometimes you don't notice good writing, you just know that you enjoy reading the book. But when you go from a book like this one to the one I am currently reading, you can appreciate the difference between good and serviceable. This fictional journal of the writer Logan Mountstuart kept me enthralled for the bulk of this bulky novel. I was sorry to see it end. I miss it. When starting with his childhood, I twitched and sighed hoping that we would soon be into Oxford days, but after twenty or thirty pages, I was hooked. Not a fan of roman a clef or historical fiction, here I was enjoying both, in a journal format, particularly the protagonist's encounters with real life figures like Hemingway or Joyce or Picasso or the Duke of Windsor. Settings were seductive, Oxford, Paris , Zurich, Bermuda or New York City. The spy tasks during WWII, the haunting prisoner of war years and aftermath, the art gallery milieu, the publishing business fascinated me. There is a Meiner Badhof interaction toward the end, oddly involving our hero, which didn't seem to fit, but I never faltered in my bulldozing through the book, picking it up at even a hint of insomnia. My favorite quote from his Southern France retirement oasis of which he writes: The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Therese inside making me a sandwich au Camembert. Munching the knob off a fresh baguette as I wander back from Saint-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding in the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. The huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialling tone of the crickets as dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and as I go to sleep the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow. (p.479) I need only the hammock and cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec to supplement this good book.
Any Human Heart is actually a highly ordered and controlled encounter with that classic French literary form, the journal intime. Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh are Boyd's true ancestors. Both writers appear in Any Human Heart . Powell is "affable"; Waugh, or a drunken man at a party who Logan thinks is Waugh, "stuck his tongue in my mouth". Logan's true secret sharer, the real tongue in his mouth, is Boyd himself, of course. From his 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa, onwards, he seems constantly to have been searching for a unifying identity across different fictions, trying to make sense of a life comprising a brutal public-school education, Africa in wartime, Oxford (where he did a PhD on Shelley), literary London and New York glamour: to a large degree, the plot of Any Human Heart . So when all is said and done, the heart the novel tries to dissect is the author's own. It is, as ever, an enjoyable spectacle for his readers. Any Human Heart, a novel, purports to be the compendious collected diaries of the fictional Mountstuart, and comes complete with little introductions by the author, footnotes and an index. It is not clear whether it was conceived originally as an extension of the spoof, or already had a life of its own, but the result is a distinctly odd book: a late-arriving lead balloon to the nicely timed punchline of Nat Tate. The narrative is made up of half-a-dozen diaries, which are devoted to different periods of Mountstuart's life of ambition and failure: schooldays, war years, dotage and so on. It ranges across the world - the novelist is born in Uruguay, raised in Birmingham and lives subsequently in London, New York, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Africa and the South of France - and takes in the century. It comes from a similar impulse in Boyd as The New Confessions, a novel in which he also tried to gain the form and pressure of our times through one life, though if Rousseau was the loose inspiration there, here it is Montaigne who skulks in the margins. Mountstuart himself, on the other hand, remains strangely insubstantial. He does things and meets people, but it’s hard to get much sense of his temperament; his observations on Fleming apply to himself, too: ‘I can’t put my finger on his essential nature . . . He’s affable, generous, appears interested in you – but there’s nothing in him to like.’ Mountstuart’s flimsiness as a novelistic character is supposed to make the book more realistic by acknowledging that personality is nebulous in itself. In practice, though, it has the opposite effect. His inconsistencies are a matter of convenience – an excuse for him to meet Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf and all the rest – and for too much of the time, Mountstuart is revealed for what he is: a device allowing Boyd to write about 20th-century celebrities in the pastiche idiom of a contemporary observer. Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey. Belongs to Publisher SeriesPenguin Celebrations (16) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
William Boyd�s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuart�writer, lover, art dealer, spy�as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth century. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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