Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24438 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, writer, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child". From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism and abject poverty.

Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere author William Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart

About the Author
William Boyd was born in Ghana. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is the author of seven previous novels and the recipient of many awards including the Whitbread First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. AN ICE-CREAM WAR was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is married and lives in Chelsea, London.

Customer Reviews

A truly rare novel.
Read this book! This is the kind of book you chance upon just once or twice every few years - a real journey. Not many authors are capable of what Boyd achieves in these pages: a clever interweaving of fact with fiction and a kaleidoscope of emotions that runs the complete gamut of human experience. I read pretty much continuously, but was unable to pick up another book for almost two weeks after finishing this - there was no point, I was...replete. It stayed with me for ages - this is the literary equivalent of a nine-course meal with a great bottle of wine. Deeply satisfying.

A life less/more ordinary?
I suppose that the measure of a good book is whether you want it to end or not.

I certainly didn't want "Any Human Heart" to end. In fact I was trembling when I read Logan Mountstuart's final diary entry. Now I am mourning the passing of a man I could not possibly have known, existing as he did only in the minds of the author and myself in the two days I have done little else but read this book.

On the face of it, "Any Human Heart" has little to recommend it. It has no plot, a character with more flaws than qualities and seemingly no message to impart.

But Boyd's book is about a life. A life that is very different from yours or mine, in as much as mine is different from yours and ours are different from anyone else's. All our lives are plotless and for the most part very ordinary. Most of us have qualities that pale into insignificance when measured alongside our faults. Logan Mountstuart enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame which - despite Andy Warhol's assertions to the contrary - we don't all experience. "Every dog has his day" is probably closer to the mark.

But in reading "Any Human Heart" we get a rare insight into someone else's life - Logan Mountstuart's - from the minutiae of what he ate for lunch to the experiences that rocked his world and changed him for better or worse. Remarkably, it didn't matter to me that Logan Mountstuart was an entirely fictional character. I suppose this is because all our lives are fictions to those who don't live them.

The title confused me at first, but now I understand. We all have our stories to tell and even the most superficially "ordinary" life is extraordinary to someone else. Just consider the popularity of television's "Big Brother" to realise how fascinating we find other people's experiences - presumably because we find our own so dull. But that is not to say that others will.

We all have our ups and downs, our foibles and our virtues and experiences that make or break us. Most of our stories go untold, but Logan Mountstuart's did not. But swap his experiences for your own and this really could have been "any human heart".

Nothing I have read for years has had such a profound effect on me as this has. I don't think I could ever read it again - lives after all are only lived once. But I shall certainly be seeking out more of Mr Boyd's books.

A rare thing
Stunningly good. I've just finished reading it for the second time - I never read books twice - and what I remember of it rings true. Big and bold - yes - a fascinating intertwining of historical fact and fiction - yes - but most of all, Boyd evokes the vibrancy of what it is to be alive to life. A fictitious memoir stocked with asides and self-doubt so real that I'd voice them about myself if I had the author's insight and command of language. Filled with simple joys, black despairs, unidealised moral turpitude, lessons of life.

Rereading AHH has rekindled my love for literature after the comparative dryness of Greene, McEwan, Murakami. I really hope that if you read this review, you'll make a respectable attempt to read this book.