One of the things I loved about this book was the character development. We first encounter the protagonist Amory Blaine as a privileged young boy and we accompany him on his journey to prep school, university, and early career. Essentially, this is a coming-of-age novel featuring all of the customary rites of passage.

From the beginning, Fitzgerald describes Amory as a romantic egotist. Only in the last chapter does the egotist evolve into a personage, as he achieves self-understanding. One of the most fascinating elements of the maturation process is that Amory, whose first letter is a juvenile response to an invitation to a children's apple bobbing party, gradually becomes more sophisticated in his ability to communicate. Fitzgerald's ability to capture this linguistic evolution in all its subtlety is one of his singular achievements as an author.

Another fascination that the book has for me is its depiction of Princeton University (my alma mater) before, during, and after World War I. In the period of pre-war innocence, Amory was drawn to Princeton "with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America." Little did he suspect that his classmates would soon be marching in uniform in the gymnasium and shipped off to war in Europe.

The chapter describing his arrival on campus is called "spires and gargoyles." Amory is a dreamy, undisciplined student and social climber who wanders the campus in a daze and eventually pays the price for his lassitude by failing a class in solid geometry. He is still a dreamer upon graduation, but at least one who is better read than when he arrived.

As much as Princeton has changed since Fitzgerald's day, some of the campus traditions described in the book still exist. For example, ambitious students still try out for the Triangle Club (a musical group that tours the country over the holidays), the chairmanship of the Daily Princetonian (the student newspaper known as "the Prince"), and the eating clubs of their choice. Incredibly, reunions were already being held (the author recounts the quiet presence of a class that graduated shortly after the Civil War). Already back then, previous university president Woodrow Wilson had failed to abolish the eating clubs in an effort to raise Princeton's academic standards. However, Wilson did not entirely fail. He left behind two legacies: an undergraduate senior thesis requirement and discussion classes known as "preceptorials." Nevertheless, as far as traditions and some perceptions are concerned, the cliche still fits: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

At the end of the book, having hit rock bottom in work and romance, a chastened Amory returns to campus--itself now transformed by the war just ended--because he considers it to be his real home. More than that, it represents a mecca and source of inspiration. Fitzgerald captures Amory's mood:

"Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light--and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..."

The Great Gatsby is colossal. It's one of those books from your high school reading list that you probably still like. I do. I love Gatsby. When I saw the Baz Luhrman movie was coming out I remembered that I once promised myself I would read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. This Side of Paradise is his first novel, published in 1920.

It's not a good book, but it's a sincere book. It's an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink book. You can tell young F. Scott Fitzgerald put EVERYTHING HE HAD into this book. His life, his loves, his poetry, every idea, every experience--he crammed it all in here and called it a novel. A lot of it doesn't fit together. Not all of it is interesting. Some of it is truly puzzling. The saving grace is that behind it all there's this exuberance and passion that keeps you turning the pages.

There's not much plot to speak of. At first you're reading a bildungsroman, the story of a young american, Amory Blaine, coming of age at Princeton University. Then the story seems to focus on his love life and becomes very episodic, with touches that show you this is a very autobiographical book. The last third of the book gets...experimental. Part of it is written as a one-act play. One brief section is stream-of-consciousness (the introduction says Fitzgerald was inspired by Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man). Then there are the poems. Loads and loads of poems. Some of them are just sort of hanging there in the middle of the chapter, without a lot of context as to what they're doing there. Oh, and there are reading lists of the hip authors Amory and his friends are reading at Princeton. Huge swaths of the novel are just discussions between Amory and his classmates about literature.

So, yeah, all the freshman mistakes are here. I can tell F. Scott Fitzgerald is a first-time novelist here because he makes the mistake new comedians make. They do stand-up comedy ABOUT stand-up comedy. Here, Fitzgerald is writing about writing before he knows how to write.

He's still more brilliant than you or I will ever be. Each section, by itself, is obviously the work of a very precocious young genius in the offing. They don't make a novel when you glue them all together, but taken a piece at a time there's a lot of fascinating stuff here. I particularly liked the section where Amory Blaine meets the devil. And some of the Princeton bits reminded me so much of my own college experience, how your mind develops and your ideas change during that time.

But what I take away is how ON FIRE Fitzgerald was to write, to get it all down, to get it all out there. That excitement is there in every line. That's the lesson of the book and it's a good one.

Oh, and I also take away that 'Amory Blaine' is a terrible name for a character.

This was Fitzgerald's first novel...it presages his budding introspective genius. His monologues are somewhat long, but still fascinating about the meaning of life.

Es la primera novela de Scott Fitzgerald y la que le lanzó a la fama.
En ella encontramos una historia pausada e introspectiva que me ha gustado mucho. Trata sobre un joven que busca su sitio en una sociedad en dónde o alcanzas el éxito o te conviertes en un don nadie. Así de duro.
Además Fitzgerald hace una mezcla muy curiosa pero que funciona muy bien: poesía, teatro y narrativa.

No es el mejor libro para empezar con el autor pero si os gustan las novelas reflexivas os gustará.

[Revised, shelves and pictures added, spoilers hidden 7/24/2022]

This was Fitzgerald’s first novel, published when he was 23. So it’s a coming-of-age novel and semi-autobiographical.



Our main character, Amory, is presented to us as a not-very-likable egotistical young god. “…he wondered how people could fail to notice he was a boy marked for glory…” He’s so “remarkable looking” that a middle-aged woman turns around in the theater to tell him so. He’s the football quarterback but hey, who cares, he gives that up. We are told older boys usually detested him.

He’s a big hit with the girls but he’s disgusted by his first kiss. There’s a lot of chasing of girls, drinking, partying, driving fast cars and a tragedy. The blurbs tell us that some young women used the book as a manual for how to be a jazz-age flapper – this in the 1920s. We even get a bit of goth when we are told that with one girl “evil crept close to him.”

The book is dense with themes, the main one being wealthy young men in an ivy-league environment – Princeton, where Fitzgerald went. So there’s a lot about college life and the competition among young men. We read of endless hours over coffee BS-ing about philosophy and their ‘rushing’ to get into the ‘right’ clubs.

There are a lot of excerpts of poetry he was reading and writing and one-sentence judgments about the classics they had to read in those days. And a bit about writing: “…I get distracted when I start to write stories – get afraid I’m doing it instead of living…”

Hanging over all these young men is not just the usual ‘what am I going to do with my life,’ but first, waiting to survive being drafted into World War I. Our main character is conscious of the changing of the generations and their different values: The Victorians are dying out and the WW I generation is in. They are playing with socialism.

He’s prescient when he tells us “Modern life changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before…” It sounds as if he’s talking about the age of the internet.

By the end of the book he is world-weary, rejected by a woman, fighting a bout of alcoholism. Disillusioned, he turns against books, women and faith. He has no family left. He is amazingly blasé in how he shrugs off the deaths of his father, then his mother, and finally a monsignor who was a mentor and confidant.

At one point Amory tells us “I detest poor people” because he saw “only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity.” Was he a Democrat or a Republican? LOL.



Almost noir and a good book. You can see Fitzgerald’s emerging genius.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles, while reading Paradise. There were many similarities. Rich young men coming of age (at a prep school instead of university) while a war goes on (WW II instead of WW I) with the draft hanging over them.

Top photo of Princeton in 1915 from princetonarchives.tumblr.com
The author (1896-1940) from thefamouspeople.com

This Side of Paradise primarily suffers from not being The Great Gatsby. And while I know that This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's first foray into writing, The Great Gatsby is most people's first foray into Fitzgerald. People have expectations, you know? This Side of Paradise just doesn't measure up. One of TSoP's main flaws is that it has virtually no plot. It does contain the rare snippets of brilliance, but you have to wade through a whole lot of tosh to find them. Still, I can't say that I hated it, however, I've definitely had naps that were more stimulating.

This was a little bit choppy and largely autobiographical, from what I understand. The ability was there, waiting to be developed, but his organizational skills weren't so hot.

I loved this passage:

"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

We can all relate, and I've never heard it said better by any other writer.

לסקירה מפורטת בעברית, קישור לבלוג שלי -

https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/this...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, unlike Nekrasov, who: "dedicated the lyre to his people," did not swing at such large-scale projects, having cut out for himself in the gardens of world literature a plot of influence of money, big money, very big money on the individual and Personality (like this, with a capital one). And that's good, thanks to his lyre we have "The Great Gatsby".

"This Side of Paradise" is Fitzgerald's first book, which immediately brought him literary fame as the youngest novelist of the Scribners publishing house and the author of the generational manifesto. And the financial success that came with her made it possible to resume the engagement with Zelda Sayre - in the novel she is depicted in the image of Rosalind - and determined the further themes of creativity. Then Fitzgerald will write all the time about the rich, the young, the beautiful, the talented, the carefree. About the world of expensive exquisite things in which they live. About the specific problems they have to face. About the sufferings of people who are excluded from the opportunity to be equal among equals in the society of the inhabitants of the earthly paradise who enter these circles.

Богатые люди - особые люди
И мудрость мало утешает
По эту сторону от рая...
Well this side of Paradise! ....
There’s little comfort in the wise.
Tiare Tahiti by Rupert Brooke
Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд, в отличие от Некрасова, который: "лиру посвятил народу своему", на такие масштабные проекты не замахивался, выкроив для себя в садах мировой литературы делянку влияния денег, больших денег, очень больших денег на индивидуума и Личность (вот так, с заглавной). И это хорошо, благодаря его лире у нас есть "Великий Гэтсби".

"По эту сторону от рая" первая книга Фицджеральда, которая тотчас принесла ему литературную славу самого молодого романиста издательства "Скрибнерс" и автора поколенческого манифеста. А пришедший с ней финансовый успех позволил возобновить помолвку с Зельдой Сейр - в романе она выведена в образе Розалинды - и определил дальнейшую тематику творчества. Дальше Фицджеральд все время станет писать о богатых, молодых, красивых, талантливых, беззаботных. О мире дорогих изысканных вещей, в котором они обитают. О специфических проблемах, с которыми им приходится сталкиваться. О страданиях людей, отлученных от возможности быть равными среди равных в обществе обитателей земного рая, вхожих в эти круги.

История Эмори Блейна, происходящего из богатой, но беднеющей на протяжении романа до полного разорения к финалу семьи: его детства, его отношений со взбалмошной красавицей матерью, с однокашниками, с наставником, с женщинами - во-многом автобиографична. Так чаще всего и бывает, дебютант пишет первую книгу с себя. В свете этого критичность автора в отношении мотиваций молодого эгоиста ("Романтический эгоист" - первоначальное название романа, под которым рукопись отклонили издательства) выглядит симпатичной. В то время, как бесконечные упоминания красоты героя производят несколько комичное впечатление.

Однако тут следует помнить, что богатство само по себе: дающее обладателю рычаги влияния, возможность созидательной деятельности и улучшения общественных институтов - мало интересует Фицджеральда. Его приоритет в эстетической сфере, отсюда утрированное желание подчеркнуть внешнюю красоту Эмори и Розалинды. Деньги ценны возможностью красиво и неограниченно тратиться на прекрасные сумасбродства. Не случайно их с Зельдой брак стал материальным выражением такого рода взглядов.

Атмосфера ревущих двадцатых, как нельзя лучше подходящих для передачи такого рода образа мыслей и действий, воссоздана в романе с детальной подробностью, а чтение Игоря Князева подсвечивает повествование, которое иногда может показаться чересчур снобским, мягкой самоиронией.

What the hell was that?

2,5*
Rich college boys, full of themselves. Not much of a plot. The poetry in between didn't help either. Writing felt like it intentionally matched the characters, jumping from here to there, rather bland without any thread or purpose, only a few sparks here and there.
And so my streak of mid books continues.

after reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory — sometimes they just don't live up. I mean, there's really no reason I shouldn't have loved this book. It's filled with philosophical musings and snappy, flirty dialogue; it's pleasantly disjointed, very slice-of-life-y; it's definitely full of verve and probably powerful ideas.... but I just couldn't get into it. I was in fact very impatient throughout. I found Amory Blaine to be a bit of a narcissistic bore, all the female characters thoroughly self-obsessed and false, and most of the other characters either inconsistent, un-memorable, or not believable.

I nearly always feel guilty about not liking a book. In this case my guilt is compounded by the fact that someone who once meant a great deal to me loved the shit out of Fitzgerald, and this book in particular; in fact, it's his copy, full of his underlinings and nearly destroyed due to the number of times it's been caught in in rainstorms, that I still have.

But Nick, I'm sorry. F. Scott, I'm sorry. I just don't love this like I used to.