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Any Human Heart

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 3,832 ratings · 520 reviews

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes...more

Foam Book, 512 pages

Published October 26th 2009 by Penguin Canada (first published 2002)

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Mar 18, 2013 Kalliope rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-english

I have liked this book a great deal more than I wanted to admit. It flows easily, and the diary format, with short entries and some gossipy ingredients, makes it hard to break away. This was addictive reading.

Several readers in GR have criticized that they do not like the main character. To me he comes across as an ordinary man, with weaknesses (alcohol and women), some cowardly reactions, but showing also bouts of integrity and a fair amount of self-honesty (to what extent does diary-writing in...more

I have liked this book a great deal more than I wanted to admit. It flows easily, and the diary format, with short entries and some gossipy ingredients, makes it hard to break away. This was addictive reading.

Several readers in GR have criticized that they do not like the main character. To me he comes across as an ordinary man, with weaknesses (alcohol and women), some cowardly reactions, but showing also bouts of integrity and a fair amount of self-honesty (to what extent does diary-writing invite to a truthful self-examination?).

As a sort of anti-hero, his story seems a twentieth century Education Sentimentale. But I wonder whether the main character and his development is the only center of the book. I think of him as a catheter-like mechanism that travels through the interstices of the Twentieth Century. He moves from Uruguay, to British public school, Oxford, London, Paris, Spain, Bermudas, Switzerland, New York, Nigeria, London again, Germany, France… Moving from place to place, he is taken in by the series of events that unfolded during the dramatic century: pre- to post- WWI; Paris Avant-Garde; Financial Crash and 30s Depression; Spanish Civil War; Crisis in the British Crown; WW2 with the London Bombings and the not-really-neutral Switzerland; again the Avant-Garde in NY in the 50s; Nigeria and the Biafra the following decade; and the 70s in decrepit London under the Labour Gov. or in Germany at the time of the Red Army Faction, etc…

The twentieth century itself emerges as the protagonist of the novel.

Boyd’s handling of facts and fiction is brilliant. He uses a typical trick found in historical novels and that can easily become a trap. In all this traveling through time, we walk through a gallery of the rich and famous (Waugh, Hemingway, Woolf, Picasso, the Windsors, etc…), but in Boyd’s pen it does not become ridiculous. He handles the edited diary form quite effectively. There are footnotes with data on real events and people, gaps are clarified through additional notes from the (fictional) editor, and finally a (fake) bibliography of the author... etc. No wonder readers at first thought that the main character had been a writer in real life.

In Any Human Heart, the life of an individual is tossed around by dramatic events so that it is hard to see to what extent the identity of any one person is shaped by circumstances and… “never say you know the last word of any human heart” (Henry James).

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Cecily Jeffrey wrote: "You know I don't like comparing books to films. I really do see them as separate entities, rarely equal. Usually the book out performs...more
Mar 30, 2013 10:47am

Kalliope Cecily wrote: "Jeffrey wrote: "You know I don't like comparing books to films. I really do see them as separate entities, rarely equal. Usually the bo...more
Mar 30, 2013 11:07am

Jan 11, 2013 Huw Rhys rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If you can imagine Johnny English meeting Rolf Harris meeting Forrest Gump meeting Grahame Greene meeting Adrian Mole (just after Sue Townshend lost interest in him), then you're not a million miles away from how the plot in this novel is set up.

And although it does contain a lot of banality along with quite a few other weaknesses, this doesn't spoil too much what is a very, very special novel.

When I read something that moves me, or resonates very strongly with me, I turn over the bottom of the...more If you can imagine Johnny English meeting Rolf Harris meeting Forrest Gump meeting Grahame Greene meeting Adrian Mole (just after Sue Townshend lost interest in him), then you're not a million miles away from how the plot in this novel is set up.

And although it does contain a lot of banality along with quite a few other weaknesses, this doesn't spoil too much what is a very, very special novel.

When I read something that moves me, or resonates very strongly with me, I turn over the bottom of the page of a book. I suppose I have this vague idea that one day I'll go and find all these turned up pages in the books that I've read and.... do something. I probably turned up more pages in this book than in most.... of the other books I've read in the past 10 years, put together. It is just chock full of tasty, golden nuggets. Just comments on life really - but extremely perceptive comments, that really hit home.

At 480-odd pages, this does feel like a long book - but it doesn't read "long" at all - in fact, I was enjoying it so much that I rationed myself to small chunks for the last 80 or so pages, just because I didn't want to finish the book. I had the sense of "I'm missing you already" when I finished the last page.

You do get the sense that an over enthusiastic sub editor must have been at work on it though - there are a series of huge, very apparent narrative contradictions - and then the odd character gets introduced as if he/ she is familiar to us, when they quite patently aren't. You expect a back story further on, and it never appears, and you can only assume that an earlier reference to that character must have been chopped out by our visceral sub editor.

But as I say, the frequent flaws don't actually detract too much from your enjoyment of this terrific story- in fact, the flaws mirror the life of our hero, Logan Mountstuart. He's no perfect specimen, but then who is? That's one of the many reasons that this book is so good.

One of the rare books that I'll be putting on my "must read again" list. I loved it.(less)

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Nov 30, 2011 Stela rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Stela by: Carmen, a friend

Shelves: memoirs-and-diaries, reviews

Every time I close a book I like to question myself about the most powerful images in it. In this one there were at least three: the announcement of Logan's father death, made by an insensitive principal (the Lizard) who explains that this is the only motive for not expelling the narrator and who hits him hard, on the same occasion, for breaking some school rules; the way the hero dresses up for a meeting with a friend in order not to be suspected that he is so poor that he eats dog-food; and th...more

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Aug 01, 2011 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Written in diary style, this novel tells of one man’s life lived through the twentieth century and it’s tricky to write what it’s actually about since the story covers such a long period of time. It contains lots of name-dropping (Edward and Mrs Simpson, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, to name but a few…) which helps to add to the biographical feel of it.

The protagonist, Logan, is not really a very likeable person. He has few redeeming features, yet despite this I still found his story compelling...more

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Jan 20, 2011 Katy added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, favorites

I don't think I've ever mourned the end of a character in quite the way I mourned Logan Mountstuart, tears winding down my temples as I peeled through the last pages in bed last night. I don't tend to get all that emotionally invested in the things I read (sentimental sure, but I typically retain that sense of fictionality ("yes, it was very sad when the man stopped drawing the deer")) but the way the main body of Any Human Heart is presented as a salvaged journal scaffolded by biographical anno...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Rachel Stevenson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I watched the Channel 4 adaptation of this novel and thought it was about the lives of some silly public school boys living irritating lives with meetings with famous figures shoe-horned in – in the first 150 pages, the protagonist, Logan, bumps into Waugh, Woolf, Picasso, Edward and Mrs Simpson, Anthony Powell, Ian Fleming as well as some Oxford Dons and minor figures from the pre-war art and literary world that I'd not heard of. However, I've enjoyed some non-fiction by Boyd, so I gave the boo...more I watched the Channel 4 adaptation of this novel and thought it was about the lives of some silly public school boys living irritating lives with meetings with famous figures shoe-horned in – in the first 150 pages, the protagonist, Logan, bumps into Waugh, Woolf, Picasso, Edward and Mrs Simpson, Anthony Powell, Ian Fleming as well as some Oxford Dons and minor figures from the pre-war art and literary world that I'd not heard of. However, I've enjoyed some non-fiction by Boyd, so I gave the book a whirl and realised how bad the adaptation was, messing as it did with the plot, compositing characters, and ageing Logan from 17 to 27 in 45 minutes meant that only the highlights of his life could be included and so he goes from love affair to love affair, making it hard to keep up, whereas the novel, written in a diary format, is much more interesting, recording minutiae, such as the price of renting a room in Chelsea, what one would eat at the Cafe Royal in 1929, which in turn creates the period ambience. Using the diary format also means that instead of writing "Two years later," Boyd can make Logan take a break from writing journal entries for a while. The point of Logan is that he is an unremarkable young man, living through massive change but more concerned with his romances and his finances, which is a fair reflection of most people's lives (his reaction to the Wall Street crash is to mix a restorative cocktail for his mother), and his story could be that of any upper-middle class man of an artistic temperament, and perhaps his meeting with the movers and shakers of the twentieth century is to show that upper-middle class life was a village (indeed, Logan gets a book deal because he bumps into his old tutor, who's set up a publishing firm). We never find out, for example. what happened to Logan's father's corned beef business, perhaps because Logan is resolutely uninterested.

There is also an index which is useful for those readers (me) who forget who's who, especially as Boyd hasn't really fleshed out all of his characters; it was only geography that made me remember which school friend was which, and Lucy, Land and Freya all seemed to be the same woman (although this was perhaps to show that Logan went for the same 'type').(less)

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Jul 19, 2012 Aubrey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: man-booker, 4-star, reviewed, 1000-guardian

4.5/5
That was a good life. A good, male life, lived through almost the entirety of the twentieth century. Or at least, it made for good reading material, but I'd like to think that in the end, Logan was happy in the least regretful sense that an old man can be.
I have to say, becoming a writer was probably the best thing he could have done in this time period. He met so many renowned folks, and took part in so many historical events as he traveled the world over. That may be my bias towards writ...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Mark Fox rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Logan Mountstuart is Boyd's central character. A young, rather pompous man of affluent Uruguayan origin, he dreams of being an author. Only he cannot overcome the stasis that follows his first, highly-acclaimed novel. This is his central weakness: laziness, an upper-middle class languidness perhaps.

As was his superlative work The New Confessions, Any Human Heart is a story of one man's life. We follow Logan from his early days at Oxford to the end that, inevitably, claims us all. You get the fe...more Logan Mountstuart is Boyd's central character. A young, rather pompous man of affluent Uruguayan origin, he dreams of being an author. Only he cannot overcome the stasis that follows his first, highly-acclaimed novel. This is his central weakness: laziness, an upper-middle class languidness perhaps.

As was his superlative work The New Confessions, Any Human Heart is a story of one man's life. We follow Logan from his early days at Oxford to the end that, inevitably, claims us all. You get the feeling this is also a story of how history passes us all by in small, seemingly meaningless events that aggregate and become landmarks of our time, documented history perhaps ever so more monumental than we can grasp as it unfolds in front of us, our eyes always somewhere else, our attention drawn inward not out.

It is also a book about love and loss and as ever, Boyd captures our collective central dilemma: the ever-changing flux of suffering and contentment, our eternal search for happiness and how we often overlook what's important - until it's too late.

Boyd also challenges us to examine our friendships, those true and false, our desires and the way fate or chance intervene in our pursuits to manifest those, and the quest to examine our lives for meaning, and the near impossibility of finding any. This is particularly effective given the diary form the novel takes: the way Logan recounts his days rather than in traditional narrative form where we are invited to view events through the character's eyes as they happen, see how they react, reflections often occurring much later if at all.

This is at times a preposterous and hilarious ride, at others a heart-aching ode to suffering and starting again. Yet it always entertains. We are invited to loath Logan Mounstuart. Then we are inclined to sympathy and even love. In the end in the scene's beautiful climax I despaired for his existence yet empathised with the plight of this complex man. In the end however, was he really that complex? Or was Logan simply an every-man painted against an unusually eventful backdrop?

I tend towards the latter (and the title tells us as much): As Boyd does so well, in this book he paints a vivid, often sordid image of any man's life.(less)

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Nov 15, 2008 Sonya rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-favorite, favorite-author, best-of-2000s, good-book-club-pick

When you start out, you'll think you might not like this book. The main character is arrogant and, well, young. Brash. But keep going through this fictionalized journal that keeps track of seventy years of a man's life, including his heartbreaks and strongest loves. Other reviewers bash it for its "Forest Gumpness," yet to me it's not all that unbelievable that an upperclass intelligence officer might have contact with influential persons during one of the world's most tempestuous and active per...more

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Dec 07, 2007 Stefanie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Didn't really like it. It's written as a diary, and covers a good chunk of the 20th century. Logan, the diarist, didn't compel me in the slightest, he was flat. Although he experienced some exciting things in his life, from meeting Hemingway and Picasso, to being imprisoned as a spy, I found him boring. I did read it through, which is something.... I kept hoping to start caring about him. But I never did. Perhaps it's the diary form that disagreed with me--I think it may be the first of that sty...more

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Apr 08, 2012 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I struggled to keep reading during the first part of the book. The character was such an annoying, self-centered, pompous prick. The vocabulary was so over the top. Usually the writing style of a book is the author's style (of course), rather than suggestive of the character's state of mind. As the book is presented as the main character's journal, clearly the latter style would be preferable. But at that moment, it wasn't evident that Boyd was going just that. I started to wonder about this boo...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Ron added it · review of another edition

I guess this book was written for the older generation. In my 30s or even 40s I would probably have dismissed it for its ramblings, its excessive length and its protagonist's arrogance and name-dropping. For some it would appear to be a sort of British equivalent of Forest Gump as its hero lives through almost the entire twentieth century meeting many of its great characters and being involved in many of its central events.

However, for us "wrinklies" I suspect, there is a great deal of fascinat...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Alun Williams added it · review of another edition

If you've ever had the experience of enjoying eating something you know you shouldn't like then you'll know how I felt about this novel. With plenty of sex, and gossip about famous people ranging from Picasso, the Duke of Windsor through to the Bader Meinhof gang, there are plenty of guilty pleasures to be had. But I just can't deal with a novel masquerading as the intimate journals of a minor English novelist as edited by an academic researcher. I felt very uncomfortable reading it. Some people...more

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May 12, 2013 Russell Bittner rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I come to this review belatedly, and only after having seen the video version of this novel twice — most recently, this evening.

I first read Any Human Heart several years ago and on the recommendation of a good British friend — no, actually, on the recommendation of the daughter of a former Swiss lover who married a Brit, but who has remained a good friend (as has her daughter) ever since.

That British daughter’s recommendation assured me at the time that I’d made the right decision in almost ma...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Nick Brett rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Although I have read a previous William Boyd, this is not the sort of book I would normally pick up. Luckily a friend insisted I give it a try.

And such a hard book to describe, at a superficial level it is a fictional autobiography (in the form of a life-long journal) that takes us through much of the 20th century. Through the journal we meet many important people from the Duke of Windsor and Ian Fleming through to various artists and writers. But it is at the deeper level where the book hooks y...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Kiera Healy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My only other experience of William Boyd was A Good Man in Africa, a darkly comic postcolonial work. I bought Any Human Heart perhaps expecting something in a similar vein. Far from it: this book is so astonishingly tragic in places that it made me want to not only give up reading it, but give up reading full stop.

Any Human Heart purports to be a series of diaries collected after the death of Logan Mountstuart, an obscure writer whose life spanned most of the 20th century, crossed four continent...more My only other experience of William Boyd was A Good Man in Africa, a darkly comic postcolonial work. I bought Any Human Heart perhaps expecting something in a similar vein. Far from it: this book is so astonishingly tragic in places that it made me want to not only give up reading it, but give up reading full stop.

Any Human Heart purports to be a series of diaries collected after the death of Logan Mountstuart, an obscure writer whose life spanned most of the 20th century, crossed four continents, and touched on major world events a number of times. We meet him first as a teenager at public school. This section has echoes of Goodbye to All That, Tom Brown's Schooldays, and other familiar school stories. He is an optimistic young man with two close friends, and the three enjoy various scrapes together.

Logan's adventures take him to Oxford, and then on to the literary and artistic scene in London and Paris. I admit that I didn't really care for his brushes with the great and the good of the 20th century. These were the sections of the novel that rang most hollow to me: he meets Woolf and Picasso, befriends Hemingway and Fleming, and has a lengthy acquaintance with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The least believable was his 1970s involvement with the Baader-Meinhof gang, which stretched my credulity a little too far. I also found myself skimming the passages when he's more heavily involved in the art world, which didn't hold my interest. When he's not rubbing shoulders with the famous, his life is far more interesting. He is involved with the Spanish Civil War, World War Two and the Biafra War, he experiences solitary confinement, and he has a number of affairs.

The diary style is well-used here. He may not write for a few years at a time, and people and plotlines naturally slip through the cracks, as they do in real life. He rarely records conversations verbatim (which I liked, as I'm fed up with "diary" stories that involve great passages of dialogue!). The younger Logan writes long and often; as he grows older, this changes. The diary style allows Boyd to show Logan's development and growth brilliantly, and I mostly found it a compelling read.

In the beginning, Logan is young and hopeful, and it's easy to like him. As his story progresses, this changes. I often disliked him, but mostly I pitied him as he grew older. Boyd has drawn a wonderful but troubling picture of the inconsequentiality of individual human lives. At times, Any Human Heart made me feel like life is just a series of tragedies building up on each other. If I struggled to read it at times it wasn't because of the poor quality of the book - quite the opposite.(less)

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Oct 26, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It had been on my to read list for sometime, so I was really glad when our book club chose "Any Human Heart" by William Boyd. But when I found that this long, 500 page, book was written as a journal, I was not initially impressed. However it turns out to be a terrific piece of fiction. Logan Mountstuart starts his journal at the end of 1923 in his last year at his private school and follows his life from his time at Oxford University (Jesus College) to his working life, wartime and up until his...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Karen Pine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

One sign of a good book is the sense of emptiness that lingers once the last page has been reluctantly turned. So it was with Any Human Heart, which completely and utterly spoiled me for whatever came next*. On finishing the book I found I missed the central character, Logan Mountstuart enormously, as if his death had been the death of someone I knew and loved. Logan, with all his failings, manages to charm and beguile the reader in the way he charmed many who crossed his path. I loved his wit,...more
One sign of a good book is the sense of emptiness that lingers once the last page has been reluctantly turned. So it was with Any Human Heart, which completely and utterly spoiled me for whatever came next*. On finishing the book I found I missed the central character, Logan Mountstuart enormously, as if his death had been the death of someone I knew and loved. Logan, with all his failings, manages to charm and beguile the reader in the way he charmed many who crossed his path. I loved his wit, his humour and, at times, his sheer anarchy and disregard for convention, religion and mediocrity.
“Shelley was so right, atheism is an absolute necessity in this world of ours. If we are to survive as individuals we can rely only on those resouces provided by our human spirit – appeals to a deity or deities are only a form of pretence. We might as well howl at the moon.”
Despite his tendency towards self-destruction, philandering and doing everything to excess, often to the detriment of himself and those around him, there is something irresistible about Logan. I realise I read a lot of women writer’s and see their world viewed through a female lens but William Boyd gave me an uncensored view of the world (and women) through a man’s eyes, which at times was revealing. I learned a lot about the male libido. I repeatedly found myself sharing his pain, particularly at the devastating (and unexpected loss to him and the reader) of his wife and daughter. Even the death of his dog towards the end of the novel reveals his frailty and compassion and desperate loneliness, without ever being clichéd or over-sentimental. As Logan’s life, from a teenager to a dying octogenarian, unravels on the pages it’s hard to believe one isn’t reading the diaries of a real person. The meetings with Hemingway, Picasso, Woolf etc all fit seamlessly into the novel, imbuing it with culture and intellectualism without ever any hint of name-dropping contrivance, implausibility or elitism. He poignantly builds a picture of Logan’s life by waylaying and detaining the reader with anecdote upon anecdote.

*For me, this Amazon reviewer sums it up:
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.

The final pages, when Logan has moved to France are beautifully poignant and evocative. From the New York Times:
“In bereft old age the voice simplifies and deepens: relinquishing his maze of purposes, Logan retains only one or two. He has moved to the Midi, where his penury pinches less and his slender means go farther.”
Boyd makes his love of France not only evident but alive. The beauty of place, of light, of manners -- the villagers are tactfully helpful to an old man whom they honor as an écrivain -- extend Logan's resources far differently than the dog food that stretched his diet in London.”

Boyd’s descriptions of food and simple pleasures abound in this novel, his later descriptions of France are sumptuous and, early on, when a young man at Oxford he says….
“After morning chapel Peter and I had a couple of free periods so we went into Abbeyhurst and took tea and crumpets at Ma Hingley’s. Hot crumpets with butter and jam – what could be more ambrosial? The day I can’t enjoy these pleasures will signal some kind of death of the soul.” (p.57)

In France about 60 years later:
The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Therese inside making me a sandwich au Camembert. Munching the knob off a fresh baguette as I wander back from Saint-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding in the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. The huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialling tone of the crickets as dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and as I go to sleep the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow. (p.479)

What a stunning passage. I am there, in France, totally. I went to an evening with Boyd at the Groucho Club in 2011, just before the televising of Any Human Heart, and asked him whether he was as pre-occupied with food as his characters appear to be. He told me he uses food as a 'shortcut' to describe his characters, you can tell a lot about a person from what and how they eat,

Another sign of a good book is the number of passages I want to remember and revisit (I mark them by turning in the bottom corner of the page) – this book was replete with them. It remains one of my all-time favourite reads.
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Sep 27, 2012 Aine O'Callaghan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Any Human Heart

I was reluctant to read this novel after suffering through the channel 4 TV adaptation. Thankfully, channel 4 just did a really poor job. I enjoyed reading Logan Mountstuart’s diary entries as he went from a posh public school to a cottage in France in his later years- with many stops in between. I started out thinking he was an a** and finished the book mourning his loss! Interestingly his character didn’t change much- my perception of it did. He was honest. Honest can be a hard...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Brenda Hawley rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wasn't sure if I would like this book as most of it is told in a diary form and that usually reads awkward to me. But William Boyd, in Any Human Heart, switches from the diary to a narration which brings more objectivity to the novel. Beginning in England, it tells the life story of Logan Mountstuart as he goes to boarding school, takes up writing, loves and loses and mixes with literary and artistic figures in Paris and New York. Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and Ian Fleming make appearances as L...more

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Apr 17, 2012 Ian Mapp rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. "Never say you know the last word about any human heart."

This really is breathtakingly good. Will be the book of the year, I am sure.

In diary format, it tells the life of Logan Mountstuart, intertwining the 20th century (he lived in every decade) with the fictional life.

He was born into money and lived in Uruguay, until returning to Birmingham as a child. We have his life through school, work, the war (where it gets very interesting), New York, London, Aftrica and finally france.

He meets all so...more

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Feb 18, 2012 Marina rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It was pure chance that I pick up this book at all. The reason I had gotten it was because I origionaly wanted you watch Any Human Heart on PBS but when I realised I had missed the first episode I sprung into action and began to look around and see if I could get my hands on the DVD. When I found out the DVD hadn't been released yet I went for the next best thing. The book.
I found the begining a bit slow a first and after a shot time I put it down. A few weeks later I picked it up again and rea...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Rochelle Cook rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Diary readers, History fanatics

Shelves: tv-series

I am 20 years old and found this book very intriguing, although i found it had ups and downs. On some reading sessions i struggled to get into the book and with others i struggled to put the book down. It is confusing in parts as there are alot of characters and alot going on, but when you stop and think about what has happend, you realise not alot has at all. It seemed like alot of unnecessary information.

on a positive note, it is interesting, and when i first started reading this book i though...more

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Oct 03, 2011 Rebecca eley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: I would put it in there with shaodw in the wind, the visitor & stuff like that

Recommended to Rebecca by: My friend Caz

Shelves: other

The story is told through the journals of Logan Mountstuart and spans the majority of the 20th century. It starts with his time at school and Oxford, touches on the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and charts his movements through America, the UK, Spain, Africa and France. He mixes with the likes of Picasso, Virginia Woolf & Evelyn Waugh.

In some respects telling the story in the style of a journal worked quite well. It was very factual and to the point. I didn’t skip over any pages be...more

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Sep 09, 2011 Laurie Saunders rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of the books I had as part of my literary spa treatment my hubbie organised secretly because my bridesmaid was that good. The main reason that I picked this book was because the narrator is a writer. What's more, the blurb at the back presented him as a flawed, failing writer and rather mediocre family man. I felt some kinship there, indeed. I started reading this book when I was pregnant but gave up about a third in as it had become too depressing for me to carry on. A lot of that h...more

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Aug 26, 2011 David Campton rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction

This is not a book I would have chosen to read for many reasons, but it was a gift and I felt I should give it a go. One the whole I was glad I did... the colour of the characterisations, the narrative drive and overall quality of the writing was excellent, and it offers an interesting snapshot of the 20th century through a single lifeline woven through significant political and artistic events of that timeframe... without the whimsical, saccharine coated faux folk wisdom of a Forrest Gump or Be...more

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Jul 27, 2011 V. rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I know a number of people who consider this book a favourite so I was expecting a lot. Sadly I was disappointed.

As the story of a man living through the major(ish) events of the 20th century, not as a main player or hero, but a fairly ordinary (if a little priviliged) man it was a neat premise. My problem with it I think can be best summed up by describing a key scene. During WW2 as an intelligence officer his family backgorund on his mother's side makes him the ideal candidate as a spy in Switz...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 20, 2011 David Manns rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

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...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Ethan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The language isn't difficult, but this is one of those books that needs 100 pages of your patience, because it takes that long for the small devices of the voice to take effect. Once they do, the last 400 pages zip along.

It's presented as though it were a posthumously published series of diary entries--NOT a memoir. This matters because the central appeal is the voice of a writer (Logan Mountstuart) talking candidly to himself, rather than positioning his experiences for public view. The attract...more The language isn't difficult, but this is one of those books that needs 100 pages of your patience, because it takes that long for the small devices of the voice to take effect. Once they do, the last 400 pages zip along.

It's presented as though it were a posthumously published series of diary entries--NOT a memoir. This matters because the central appeal is the voice of a writer (Logan Mountstuart) talking candidly to himself, rather than positioning his experiences for public view. The attraction of Mountstuart plainly delivering what happened, complete with his reactions at the time--flawed, ugly, comic, endearing, and/or puzzling--only grows as the book progresses.

It's telling that the two organizing principles of the diary are his experiences with women and the passage of time taking its toll on his body, and it's all the more fun because he knows he's self-absorbed (it's a diary, after all) and preoccupied with sex and death.

It's also clever that Boyd figures out how to maintain Mountstuart's fundamental character even as experience softens the edges--he's bratty/frustrated and funny in school, a sex-addled wrecking ball in his twenties, an interesting cad rescued by love in his thirties, and a figure in shades of gray thereafter, one whose humor seems to sharpen.

So yes, it takes a while to get rolling, and I'll throw in a second minor gripe--I could have lived without all the namedropping (Hemingway, Picasso, the Duke of Windsor, etc.) and history-hopping (interestingly, Boyd seems to acknowledge this when Mountstuart briefly muses about men on the moon in 1969, set against the problem of autobiographical writing, about three quarters of the way through).

Then again, Any Human Heart is a good counterargument for those readers who won't go on if they can't root for the main character. Mountstuart is neither a hero nor a baddie, and the book expands wonderfully on the challenge of the title. We get an unvarnished look at a long, interesting life.

It's a good read, if you give it the time.(less)

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About William Boyd

Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.

At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland an...more Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.

At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he returned to Oxford as an English lecturer teaching the contemporary novel at St Hilda's College (1980-83). It was while he was here that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published.

Boyd spent eight years in academia, during which time his first film, Good and Bad at Games, was made. When he was offered a college lecturership, which would mean spending more time teaching, he was forced to choose between teaching and writing.

Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. He also became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the same year, and is also an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of St. Andrews, Stirling and Glasgow. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005.

Boyd has been with his wife Susan since they met as students at Glasgow University and all his books are dedicated to her. His wife is editor-at-large of Harper's Bazaar magazine, and they currently spend about thirty to forty days a year in the US. He and his wife have a house in Chelsea, West London but spend most of the year at their chateau in Bergerac in south west France, where Boyd produces award-winning wines.
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“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.” — 36 people liked it

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