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Loading... Any Human Heart (original 2002; edition 2003)by William Boyd
Work InformationAny Human Heart by William Boyd (2002)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  maryreinert | Feb 20, 2024 |   In the frame story as the novel begins, an elderly man sits editing his journals, presumably for publication. These journals, kept throughout his life, begin in 1923 when 17-year old Logan is in his last year at Abbey, an upper class British boarding/prep school. The journals continue through his years at Oxford, his career in journalism and somewhat successful attempts at becoming a novelist, his love affairs and marriages, and his different careers. He publishes some books and has a successful career managing a New York art gallery; one of his later jobs is teaching English literature in Nigeria. Living in London and traveling often to Europe, especially Paris, he socializes with some of the most famous figures of the 30’s and ‘40’s arts world, among them Hemingway (who befriends him), Fitzgerald, Picasso, Ian Fleming, and Virginia Woolf (whom he doesn’t care for). Ian Fleming recruits him for British Naval lntelligence at the beginning of World War II, and one of his numerous assignments is a mission to the Bahamas to keep an eye on the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, whose characters are convincingly drawn. As a journalist he covers parts of the Spanish Civil War and three decades later joins a revolutionary group of terrorists. Logan’s life is a long and eventful one set on many continents. He succeeds and fails, wins and loses love, is happy and in despair, as his life progresses into the ‘90’s. I very much enjoyed following Logan through this very interesting life and felt at the end of the novel as if I’d lost a friend. (  )1  dianelouise100 | Feb 13, 2024 |  )1 saschenka | May 4, 2022 |  ) wordloversf | Aug 14, 2021 | )1 Patsmith139 | Mar 15, 2021 |
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 Boydâ??s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuartâ??writer, lover, art dealer, spyâ??as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.1)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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After meeting Freya, he begins an affair which leads to a bitter divorce and almost total estrangement from his son. Soon WWII begins and Logan is drafted into Navel Intelligence. During this time, he comes in company of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson. He becomes a paratrooper and is captured spending almost two years in a French prison.
After the war, he learns his wife and child have been killed. He travels with connections to his school friends meets various artists including Picasso and writers as Hemingway - to France, Portugal, and Spain. Along the way, he drinks, he smoozes, he has affairs. Eventually he marries again and becomes close to a stepdaughter.
Throughout his life, he is self-absorbed (the only people that seem to have touched him are Freya, the daughter, and the stepdaughter along with ins and outs of Ben and Peter.
The story is not told in narrative form but in the form of diary entries thoughout his long life. At first it took me a while to get into that format, but later found it fascinating - short, funny, in places and brutally crass in others.
I didn't like Logan Mountstuart but he had some redeeming qualities and at times, I felt sorry for him. It seemed a true, honest, and intimate look at the internal feelings of one man without a lot of angst - it just is what it is.
Would definitely read more by this author (