Any Human Heart
Ratings11
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings11
Average rating3.7
ANY HUMAN HEART is an ambitious, all-encompassing novel. Through the intimate journals of Logan Mounstuart we travel from Uruguay to Oxford, on to Paris, the Bahamas, New York and West Africa, and meet his three wives, his family, his friends and colleagues, his rivals, enemies and lovers, including notables such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.
Reviews with the most likes.
A difficult one to rate for me - the writing was excellent but I can't say I liked the book because I have just spent 85 years in the life of someone I really did not like very much.
What a wonderful book. The intimate journals of one Loagan Gonzago Mountstuart, this book follows one man's life across the 20th Century. Presented as edited entries from his personal journals, Boyd follows his protagonist from University, through his early career as a writer, the war, running an art gallery in New York to a final, quite moving old age in Britain and France.
Along the way Logan manages to rub shoulders with the great and the good (Hemingway, The Duke and Duchess of York, Picasso and many others) while experiencing the small victories and tragedies of his own life. Logan is well aware of his own shortcomings as both a lover, father, husband and human being and never flinches from recording this in his journals. Boyd has managed to conjure a very convincing account of one man's life.
Certain passages stand out. His Spanish Civil War experiences; his time as a spy in the Bahamas during WWII; his imprisonment in Switzerland in the dog days of the war and the tragedy of his return to Britain after the war.
Later, Logan experiences a poverty stricken old age in dull and dour 70's London, but even here manages to get involved in the fringes of the more radical political movements (Red Army Faction; Baader-Meinhoff). A stroke of luck finds him living out his last days in a small village in France and I found these last entries very moving.
All in all a great, unconventional novel. Highly recommended.
