Word: mountstuart
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...richly illustrated pages, dating from the 1350s, are bound and wrapped in red silk. Though the book rarely goes on display, Society staff insist the medieval text is in excellent condition. It came to Mumbai in the possession of a 19th century British antiquarian grandee, the imperially named Mountstuart Elphinstone, and has stayed in the city ever since despite numerous attempts by the Italian government to repatriate it. In the 1930s, rumor has it, dictator Benito Mussolini was keen to buff his fascist pedigree by retrieving the epic and offered the Society one million pounds for it, a staggering...
Boyd was born in Ghana and lives in France, but he is a comic novelist in the best English tradition of Waugh and Amis (Kingsley, that is). Any Human Heart is the diary of Logan Mountstuart, an English writer whose long, languid life begins in 1906 and embraces most of the 20th century. Mountstuart starts his diary as a senior in high school--a sixth former, as they say--and goes on to chronicle his years at Oxford, his early literary efforts and his assorted marriages and affairs. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, flip-flopping between passionate love and fashionable ennui...
...book's narrative pulse quickens with the onset of World War II, when Mountstuart is assigned intelligence work and becomes embroiled in the affairs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the former looking "like a miniature American film star, slim and dapper." Up to this point, Mountstuart has managed to skim lightly over the surface of the century, only rarely involving himself deeply with anyone or anything. But the war leaves him a sunken wreck--physically intact, spiritually destroyed...
...Mountstuart is too much of a hedonist to grieve for long, however. Soon his high spirits buoy him back to the surface, and he's off again: to New York City as an art dealer, to Africa as a professor of English, and beyond. Throughout, Boyd expertly keeps up the irregular tap-tap rhythms of diary writing--often the gaps in Mountstuart's chronicle, when he is too depressed or having too much fun to write, are as eloquent as the words themselves--and Boyd has a biographer's eye for arranging the multitudinous ironies and serendipitous connections that...
...Like any really honest diary, Any Human Heart is just a random, jumbled heap of days, most immensely amusing, some unbearably sad, but together they carry the full, devastating force of a lifetime of intermingled joy and pain. "Isn't this how life turns out, more often than not?" Mountstuart writes. "It refuses to conform to your needs--the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth." Mountstuart struggles heroically to give his life this rough shape. He never quite does so. That's his failure as a person--but Boyd...