Fitzgerald è gli anni '20 e gli anni '20 sono Fitzgerald

Although less than a quarter of its pages are devoted to the protagonist's years in a private secondary academy, "This Side of Paradise" seems extremely preppy. A slightly longer section is devoted to the hero's time in university where he shows himself to be thoroughly superficial. He cites Chesterton, Goethe, Shaw, Tarkington, Trotsky, Verlaine, Yeats, Synge, Galsworthy, Huysmans and scores of other writers without appearing to have understood any of them. He is at his best flirting with flappers who belong like him to the upper middle classes. In the second half of the novel the wealth that he had counted on inheriting evaporates and the girl that he was counting on marrying dumps him for a guy with solid money. The protagonist tries to see a bright side to his situation. On the final page, he notes that like a good student of Socrates, he now knows himself but acknowledges that he will need to learn many other things if he is to thrive and prosper.
For me the best moment in this sophomoric novel came in the last chapter where the newly impecunious protagonist has resorted to hitch-hiking in order to save money. When a rich person gives him a ride, he becomes bitter and begins to proclaim that the world should become socialist. Then he learns that the rich person is the father of a friend of his who was killed in WWI. He quickly realizes that his angry words are entirely inappropriate and that the occasion calls for him to express his solidarity and compassion for the grieving father. It is a sensitive and intelligence moment in the book of which there are far too few.

This book disappointed me. It is about a bored and boring? over-privileged, self-centered and narcissistic young man with an overblown ego. 2 stars.

A very flawed novel but one much adored in its day---in fact, Paradise was FSF's best known work during his lifetime (not Gatsby). Inevitably, biographers pun on it: THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE, EXILES FROM PARADISE, CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE---okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the point.

What's most interesting about TSOP (as we in the Fitz biz call it) is the new type of Bildungsroman it established. Unlike Victorian coming-of-age novels (think Dickens), Amory Blaine's story avoids easy resolution and creates one of the more realistic portraits of adolescent indirection found in 20th cen lit. I would argue that there'd be no Holden if not for Amory---which, given the lambasting Catcher in the Rye has taken lately, may not have been a bad thing.

There's much charm in here: my own favorite character is Eleanor Savage, the daredevil among the women character. Rosalind---often thought to be a transparent portrait of Zelda---isn't sympathetic on the surface, but if you understand her predicament as a teenage girl in the 1910s, you begin to feel some empathy for her. There are also marvelous bursts of rhetoric, including the closing oratory on Amory's generation, which has grown up to find "all wars fought" and "all gods dead."

On the downside, the main character himself can be cloying---something that wasn't necessarily FSF's fault. He was working with a character type known as the "mooncalf," a teenage boy pining for love, and between talk of petting and wearing other men's BVDs (you'll have to check out the "Supercilious" chapter on your own!), he can seem a bit of a woos.

Nevertheless, TSOP captured something as America entered the Jazz Age, and the book, for all its faults, is gossamer and sad in all the lovely ways we expect from Mr. Fitzgerald.

So how is it that this novel, despite it’s shortcomings, was still able to be successful? Ask any New York agent to represent your literary novel with a male protagonist and he'll tell you: “Literary novel’s with a male protagonist are hard sells.” And they are. Think about it: How many literary novels with male protagonists have you enjoyed in the last, say, five years? Probably zero. The key to the success of This Side of Paradise is in Fitzgerald’s mastery of the Male Protagonist in a Literary Novel Problem. But why should this even be a problem at all? It’s my belief that males generally don’t relate to one and other. They dominate each other. The question of ‘do you respect a full grown man?’ really comes down to: ‘is he dominate in some way?’

In a literary novel, a male protagonist is essentially going after the status quo. He’s saying that the society in which you live needs to change. We’re not apt to give credence to a full grown male who thinks things should change and yet is not in a powerful situation. We’ll assume it’s sour grapes. So, in a literary novel, a male lead must be powerful enough to have an unbiased view of the problem he sees with society. The difficulty is that powerful, dominant men generally don’t tend to be sensitive and open-minded enough to appreciate a societal problem. What’s needed in a literary male protagonist is a delicate balance of sensitivity and strength that we don’t normally see in the real world.

Many a would-be author will pen a male protagonist who just isn’t strong enough for us to feel sympathy for him. And striking this balance, or countermining this principle, has been the secret struggle of many a literary author. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a whinny, emotional punk… but he was the king of Denmark; T.S. Garp was a famous author; most all of Hemingway's male leads were war veterans or soldiers or, in the case of The Old Man and the Sea, handicapped with age. Other ways to get around the unsympathetic male protagonist is with youth, ie, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, or insanity, (see: Hamlet, yet again), Lolita, Moby Dick (Captain Ahab) and Slaughter House Five.

The average, weak and sensitive male is to be avoided at all costs by the would-be author of literary fiction. History shows us that it is only kind to those that follow this principle and This Side of Paradise is no exception. Where Fitzgerald succeeds is with his execution of what I’ll call the Snob Narrator (something that he wasted no time in establishing in The Great Gatsby). Armory Blaine is sensitive and weak in many ways—for example his vanity—but since he is a Princeton student and literary scholar, we know he also has dominance. It’s this balance of sensitivity and strength (much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that convince us through the 268 pages of this novel until the very end that Armory Blaine might have the solution to what is wrong with society. SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t. Fun read though. And very inventive.

This book was hard. I am probably not intellectually mature enough for this, or, if I try not to be so self-depricating, it seems like Fitzgerald wraps his ideas in circling words that never quite make their point. I'll concede probably the former and not the latter. In other words - you guys, I don't get it! But it had some pretty moments -

Here's a very relevant one:
" 'Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won't idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?'
'What brings it about?'
'Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence' " (p153)

Here's a pretty one:
"There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes" (p162)

Here's a feel-good one:
"No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody" (p216)

And here's another relevant one:
"For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations" (p245)

Let's close with that, since I have naught else to say.


P.S. Fitzgerald wrote this novel when he was 23, and that's how old I am.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all!”

And that’s how the novel ends. The book made Fitzgerald rich at 24. Sometimes I have to wonder what people in The Roaring Twenties saw in it.

It is a manuscript that progresses from narrative to pages of poetry to tell the story; then to setting out the lines and actions of a stage play to carry the novel forward; then to love stories that never end well; then to naive and blustering arguments for socialism (it was after all 1920, and he’d written the novel in the years prior, with the Russian Revolution only two years young); then ending with a severely nihilistic attitude towards practically everything.

But we write and say a lot of iconoclastic things at 24 if we are in the habit of hashing things out in our mind over and over again. The male protagonist, Amory, who appears to a certain degree to be a sketch of Fitzgerald, doesn’t seem to know himself at the end, in any case. Except for his love affairs with four women, especially Rosalind, the novel did not enthrall or hold my interest.

Yes, there is some beautiful writing, some wonderful metaphors and similes, some lovely poetic flow to a rather chopped up narrative. But six years of his life later, when he publishes The Great Gatsby at 30, we see a much more cohesive and nuanced approach to writing that produces one of the great novels of American literature.

The Beautiful and the Damned was his second novel (1922), Gatsby his third (1926), Tender is the Night his final complete work (1934), and what a tragedy that was, but then, so was Gatsby. The writing in Gatsby is superior to This Side of Paradise in so many ways, yet it was not the bestseller Paradise was. Is that because the partying public didn’t like Fitzgerald’s criticism of their world in Gatsby?

There were several parts I enjoyed very much even if the overall effect on me was pretty gray.

È un romanzo molto sperimentale, è evidente dall'alternarsi di pura narrazione, lettere, testi teatrali, poesie... una struttura del genere potrebbe rallentare o interrompere il flusso narrativo ma devo dire che qua funziona molto bene.
È un romanzo senza uno scopo specifico, incentrato sulla pura crescita di un personaggio e l'evoluzione del suo pensiero e della sua visione di se stesso nel corso della sua vita. La conclusione è fenomenale.

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.”

I don't know about you, but I just simply ADORE the jazz age. All that alcohol, all that music, all that raunchiness. It's pure decadence. This book, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first book, is a love letter to this time period. He charts the life of young Amory Blaine as he traverses through college and a number of romances. Even though this story takes place decades ago, it has elements that one can relate to even in this day and age. Plus, Scott's writing is just fun! There's something for everyone to enjoy here! ;)


“I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”

“I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all.”

This was Fitzgerald’s first novel and the one the catapulted him into fame and riches at the young age of 23. Whilst I don’t like it quite as much as I do The Great Gatsby, this still holds all the depth and details that I love in Fitzgerald’s work.

In this book we follow Amory Blaine throughout his young years, growing up and going to Princeton, and his young adult life trying to find his way. We see his many attempts at love and his failings and we see him try to understand himself as he learns more and more about the world and the way it all works. Fitzgerald really captures that sense of the unknown when you are in your early twenties and trying to figure out the path you want to carve in life. This book is pretty satire and Fitzgerald’s witty and lyrical prose is a pleasure to read.
His usual themes are present; wealth, doomed love, faith, society and even socialism. I must say I did find it a little jarring at times as the way the story is written changes and various intervals. There are pages of poetry, letters, even a segment written like a play. But overall it ended up just showing his merits and skill as an author.

I do hope to read all of Fitzgerald’s novels this year as he is one of my favourite authors. I can’t wait to experience some of his other stories.

Great debut novel featuring a highly intelligent, if somewhat lackadaisical, young man who's off to figure out his life. It's not so much meandering in form, but it is written to be episodic in nature, and this approach may turn some readers off to the complete experience. I quite enjoyed it, however, and I was otherwise floored by the technical excellence of Fitzgerald's writing. Every line was ingenious and descriptive, while somehow feeling buttery and smooth. Sometimes the sentences were so perfectly structured you could just roll them around in your mouth a while. It's savory.

Just as well, I did come away from the book having enjoyed Amory's character. He's a bit of a dandy, but Fitzgerald did well to communicate the growth of a young man who has to try and fail repeatedly to discover that he doesn't need all of the things he had expected to. Through trial and error, Amory learns to brush off and discard the lesser aspects of his character. It's a coming of age story that you don't need to be a part of the smart set to fully appreciate.

It builds steadily to an appreciably bracing conclusion, and that last sentence summed up the spirit of the entire work. Definitely worth picking this one up if you feel so inclined.

This Side of Paradise captures a pretentious man's plight from childhood into the sunken sorrows of young adulthood. Amory, an over-zealous academic who resembles not only Fitzgerald but also every I-take-myself-too-seriously student in America, seeks to find his identity in a nation that already has pre-determined what characterizes a "gentleman:" becoming an Ivy-League student; getting drunk with friends and sleeping with girls; having a witty manner; and writing well. But even living within this seemingly decadent world of success, Amory still struggles to find himself and his happiness. How American.

Behind Amory's cynicism and dark wit remains a lost American boy who just wants to find truth, a desire that remains true for so many young adults. The book ends without a conclusion, which, paradoxically, turns out to be a conclusion itself: life is a continuous struggle of uncertainties, disappointments, and failures, and the only way to find happiness might be embrace such haunting realities.