Any Human Heart

The British writer Logan Gonzago Mountstuart was born in 1906 and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. In William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart, Mountstuart recounts the story of his demise through only the first few chapters of the book, with each individual chapter being an italicized remembrance by someone else. His story is one of mediocrity and disappointment, as he found it hard to progress in his writing career. The novel is written in the form of Mountstuart's 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 Uruguayan 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