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''Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart'' is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf in London, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce in Paris, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway that spans several years. Boyd spent 30 months writing the novel. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on publication, but has sold well. A television adaptation was made with the screenplay written by Boyd, first broadcast in 2010. ==Composition== Mountstuart appeared in Boyd's short story "Hôtel des Voyageurs" written in the early 1990s and published in ''London Magazine'' and his 1995 collection ''The Destiny of Nathalie 'X. The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s. It was written in journal form and was, like Connolly's journals self obsessed, lyrical and hedonistic. Boyd was obsessed with Connolly as a schoolboy, avidly reading his reviews in ''The Sunday Times'', and later read his entire published œuvre and found his flawed personality 'deeply beguiling'.〔(William Boyd explains the origins of Any Human Heart's Logan Mountstuart | Books | The Guardian ) Retrieved 2012-01-11.〕 In 1988 Boyd had written ''The New Confessions'' as a memoir, the hoax biography of an invented artist, ''Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960'', in which Mountstuart reappeared. Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, a black-and-white photograph Boyd of whom had found in a French second-hand shop. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952".〔Tayler, Christopher (A Bit of a Lush ) ''The London Review of Books'', Vol. 24, No. 10, May 2002, London. Accessed 9 August 2010〕 Boyd described him as, Boyd distinguished journal, biography and memoir as literary forms, different treatments of the same essential subject, the human condition, the change in medium justified his writing again of a whole-life view: "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered."〔Cox, Tom. "(William Boyd:The Magician of Realism )" ''The Daily Telegraph'', 16 April 2002, London.〕 Though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, Boyd acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York.〔Mullan. John. (The Heart Has Its Reasons ) www.theguardian.co.uk. 11 November 2006. Accessed 9 August 2010.〕〔 Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of ''Any Human Heart'' took 30 months as he carefully plotted Mountstuart's life to be significant but seem random, a period during which he bought several hundred books. He spent another year and a half writing the book.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Any Human Heart」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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