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Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1400031001
ISBN-13: 9781400031009
Jan 2004
Publisher: Random House Inc
512 pages
Reprint
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
Nine journals recording a turbulent life, kept through the years by Logan Mountstuart, a man who is born in South America (son of a British executive there), is educated at Oxford, and serves as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War. He hangs out with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Picasso, and works with Ian Fleming in British Intelligence, and by the 1970s he has become a terrorist in Germany--and then a flamboyant Manhattan art dealer. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Size | | Length: | 512 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 17.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: ""Yo, Logan," I wrote. "Yo, Logan Mountstuart, vivo en la Villa Flores, Avenida de Brasil, Montevideo, Uruguay, America del Sur, El Mundo, El Sistema Solar, El Universo." These were the first words I wrote-or to be more precise, this is the earliest record of my writing and the beginning of my writing life-words that were inscribed on the flyleaf of an indigo pocket diary for the year 1912 (which I still possess and whose pages are otherwise void). I was six years old."
Industry Reviews
"A rich, unruly work....[I]n its best pages (of which there are a fortunate many), a nearly irresistible entertainment."
Kirkus Reviews (11/15/2002)
"ANY HUMAN HEART is a bigger, more ambitious book than throwaway Boyd efforts like STARS AND BARS and ARMADILLO, and while it's a bumpy performance at times, Mr. Boyd does such a nimble job of ventriloquism in the book's opening sections that we find ourselves forgetting that Mountstuart is a fictional character....Like Samuel Pepys--whose diaries ANY HUMAN HEART occasionally seems meant to recall...--Mountstuart is thoroughly shameless when it comes to women....Because Mountstuart is such a shallow fellow and considerably less charming than Pepys, the reader follows his adventures not with sympathetic affection, but with wry, sometimes teeth-clenched fascination....[A] fascination with Mountstuart's dogged determination to survive and Mr. Boyd's refusal to sentimentalize his slow, grudging move from self-absorption to a recognition of a larger world."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (02/14/2003)
"Wry sympathy ought not to be much of a hook to haul us through an account that for long stretches...is not particularly sympathetic or even particularly exciting. Yet hauled we are and, despite some becalming, pleasurably. Boyd endows his narrator with no special quality of perception or sensibility as he recounts his sorties, ambitions, exuberant gains, painful reverses and long-term decline. What he does give him is integrity of voice if not of spirit, the lightest mockery of his own inconsequentiality and a gracefully chiseled play of sentence and phrase."
New York Times Book Review - Richard Eder (02/16/2003)
"[T]he novel is very much more than a travelogue through the past century. It is a reflection on the shape of individual lives: the themes, the repetitions, the true and false friendships; the way we are inevitably diverted from the straight courses we wish to pursue; the near impossibility of imposing meaning onto our experiences....[Mountstuart] makes an extremely attractive central character. Boyd is one of the most skillful and appealing writers at work today, endowed with both a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism."
Atlantic Monthly - Brooke Allen (03/01/2003)
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