Merry Wanderer of the Night + TIME

Book Review: Any Human Heart

I'll admit right now that I don't know exactly what to say about Any Human Heart

. Weeks after finishing it I still don't think I have it quite figured out. It's a series of fictional journals written by Logan Mounstuart from 1923-1991. The book is really marketed by the span of time it covers--which was truly interesting. While Mounstuart meets many famous men and women through his years though, I think the true triumph of the novel is how easily it made me believe it was true. William Boyd is a master at creating journals. Nothing really happens in any of them, true to life, yet I couldn't put them down. Boyd really gets into the nitty gritty, sex, illness, death, flaws. It was all so realistic. I found myself frequently looking up this book on the Internet just to make sure it wasn't about a real man or that William Boyd wasn't just the editor of these journals. And it was confirmed repeatedly that this is indeed fiction.

I'd never heard of this book until Michael Kindness mentioned it a few times as his favorite book on Books on the Nightstand. I've read quite a few books he loves because his taste always seems to line up pretty well with mine. It seems like I know the reason now. I'm an avid reader of nonfiction and Michael really likes books that have real elements to them, like drawings by the characters or maps. So really what Michael likes is fiction that poses as nonfiction, which is probably why I like the fiction he recommends.

This one is really just a tough book to explain. Michael had a hard time explaining it too, and if he didn't have such a good track record with me I probably wouldn't have picked it up. I could tell you about characters who makes appearances in this book, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, but that really isn't the point of the book. Monstuart was born at the turn of the century and is around twenty when the book starts. You get to see him make ridiculous mistakes throughout his whole life right before he dies at the end of the century. I'll be honest and I say I really didn't care for him much as a person. He was whiney, rude, oversexed, and lazy. I think not liking him made me enjoy the book more though-- it was like reading the diary of your worst enemy and finding out their life wasn't so great after all.

So there. I tried. You really ought to read it though, it's fantastic.

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Book Review: Any Human Heart + TIME