Another book which I read rather late for a discussion in the Reading the 20th Century group - this was my first experience of reading Fitzgerald, and did not entirely convince me that I want to read more, perhaps because I didn't find any of the characters very likeable (perhaps because so much of the darker material is thinly veiled personal experience), and some of the plotting gets very contrived. For all that it is well written and easy to read, so I don't want to be too negative.

The early chapters are written from the perspective of Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress who gets drawn into the world of the main protagonists Dick and Nicole Diver while travelling in the French Riviera. Dick is a psychiatric doctor, and the middle part of the book goes back to tell the story of how he met Nicole, a rich heiress who was initially his patient.  The final part of the book charts Dick's slow decline into alcoholism and self-destruction.

A good novel is like a good wine..

After finishing it, it will leave you with a wonderful aftertaste in your mouth!!

Exactly this is what happened to me with Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald..

Fitzgerald worked on Tender is the Night for almost 9 years, but after publication it flopped..
Although he had great hope and put his whole soul in it..

It was not received well by the readers, and it became a commercial failure..

Nevertheless after reading this masterpiece, I want to read more by Fizgerald!!
In fact, I will continue my readings with another of his novels..

But let gets started:

Rosemary Hoyt, a young and pretty filmstar falls in love with Dick Diver a handsome psychiatrist..
Dicks wife Nicole is beautiful and very wealthy, but has issues with mental illness!!

Beginning at the French Riviera Fitzgerald introduces and gives us a privy look at the world of the very rich and famous with his glittering facades and hollow vanities..

And he also managed to wrap up difficult themes like incest, alcoholism, racism, murder, mental illness and adultery!!

The writing is superb, poetic, powerful and captivating!!
You will read senteces so full of beauty and poetry as only Fitzgerald could create them..

I'm still pondering about the fictional characters in his novel, as if they were living persons!!
Tender is the Night has stirred strong emotions deep in me, and has raptured me far away to other worlds..

And let me also say that Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my absolute highlights at goodreads for this year!!

Full recommendation to all my goodreads friends with five glittering stars!!

Dean;)

Rosemary (young movie star) and husband and wife, Dick and Nicole Diver, all expats in France… Dick is originally a psychiatrist and Nicole was his patient - a psychologically unhealthy relationship for both.

My version is the original, with time jumps (many editions were chronological). The middle period of the story (the start of the original structure), when Dick first meets Rosemary is somewhat slow. Once you understand more about Dick and Nicole, it gets better.

A bit like Thomas Hardy, some of the characterisation is weak, though there are some vivid descriptions and epithets.

This was a bit of a disappointment for me. I adored Gatsby and I expected to love this. When I first started it I thought it was going to be better than Gatsby but somewhere about halfway through it lost its way or I lost mine or something. I found the second half to be too wandering and, well, boring. It does pick up towards the end and I'm glad I read it. The characters were well developed and Dick Diver in particular was fascinating. I am definitely going to pursue more works by Fitzgerald. At the top of my list are The Beautiful and the Damned and This Side of Paradise.

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.”

n  n    n  n

If you were to meet Dick and Nicole Diver at a party, a restaurant, or on the beach, you would leave them feeling as if you had been in the presence of greatness. They are both witty, charming, gorgeous, majestic, sexy, and in command of whatever situation they find themselves in. They are the sun and moon merged together, and no one shines brighter in the daylight or in the moonlight. They are what many aspire to be, but few will ever achieve, the suave assurance of the Diver couple.

As Rosemary Hoyt, a burgeoning movie starlet, says after meeting them, ”The Divers made her want to stay near them forever.” She loves them both, but she wants a part of Dick for herself. She might be naive, but even she senses that to break them apart dissipates the magic of the two of them together.

The Divers are at the height of their power when Rosemary meets them. Nicole Warren is obscenely rich, and Dick is a successful, published psychologist. They met when Nicole was suffering a mental breakdown. Dick brought her back from the brink. ”They were more interested in Nicole’s exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.” The Warren family is used to owning everything in their universe.

She is so beautiful and tragic, and Dick, like most of us, wants to preserve lovely things. He is on the verge of reaching the pinnacle of his profession. He is breaking new ground and getting noticed by the top men (this is 1929) in his field. That drive he has to succeed erodes as he starts to enjoy the life on the Riviera more than the life in a clinic in Zurich. Who wouldn’t? Aren’t we supposed to enjoy being rich?

Dick is well aware that there is only a small window in every smart man’s life to experience success. ”You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believed you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like everyone else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.”

n  n
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

It is impossible to separate F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre from the characters populating his novels. Their almost mythical love affair and the disastrous unraveling of their lives are mined heavily by Scott for his novels and stories. Zelda was often exasperated to find something gay and spirited she had said at a party or something dark and insightful she may have shared in the privacy of the bedroom show up in Scott’s writing. She was in many ways the subject of all of his writing. She was certainly the muse.

F. Scott drank too much, and Zelda slowly slid into madness. She died at 47 and he at 44. They had lives used up too quickly.

Dick has Rosemary fluttering around him like a lovely, lustrous satellite, but Nicole has her numerous admirers, as well. Foremost of these is Tommy Barban. ”He sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, and earnest Satan.” He is virile and alive and lustful. He lacks Dick’s polish and sophistication, but then Dick, as he drinks more and more, isn’t exactly Dick anymore.

“‘We can’t go on like this,’ Nicole suggested. ‘Or can we?--what do you think?’ Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, ‘Some of the time I think it’s my fault--I’ve ruined you.’

‘So I’m ruined, am I?’ he inquired pleasantly.

‘I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things--now you seem to want to smash them up.’”

As Dick and Nicole’s dependency on one another becomes more and more uncertain, the influences of others start to drive wedges between them. It is like watching the disintegration of a monument. They can not find the synergy with other people that they had together, but they can’t find it with each other anymore, either. The whole was greater than the sum of their parts.

Fitzgerald is wonderful at dangling this world of infinite possibility that so infused the 1920s era. Living for today, not worrying about tomorrow, and not letting the past be a burden on the present. Even as he shows us this glittering world, he begins to inch back the curtain to reveal the darkness that holds it all up. To be Dick and Nicole, they must be on the top of their game all the time. They are performance artists. They dazzle those fortunate enough to be around them, but like most rock stars, they start to feel the pressure to always entertain. Alcohol or drugs can take the edge off and temporarily make them feel like themselves, but eventually the centers of who they are become buried under the shimmering facades of the people everyone wants them to be.

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Le doy cuatro estrellas porque me ha parecido un libro sumamente interesante que trata varios temas que sorprende que trate, dado que se publicó a principios de los años 30. 
Y es que Francis Scott Fitzgerald trata el tema de las enfermedades mentales como creo que no se había tratado antes y no sólo se queda ahí sino que aborda la cuestion del cuidador del enfermo, del familiar agotado y estresado.
Y todo sería ideal si no fuera porque el protagonista es muy protagonista. Todo gira alrededor de él, el mundo funciona o se desmorona en relación a él. Es un egocéntrico que no cree serlo, un egoista, un cínico y un hipócrita que se aprovecha de las mujeres. Y esto no es lo malo del caso. Hay muchos personajes así en la literatura, lo malo es que tengo la impresión de que Scott Fitzgerald intenta justificar y librar de todo cargo a su personaje masculino. Intenta por todos los medios hacer que nos caiga bien y que sintamos pena por él cuando las cosas se le hacen demasiado grandes. Y el lector no puede evitar ponerse del lado de este pobre hombre, pero hasta cierto punto. Puedes comprender a Dick, pero no justificarle, no excusarle. Para más inri la decadencia y los malos hábitos hacen caer a Dick a un pozo de patetismo y la autocompasión implícita me produce rechazo, debería sentir lástima por él (y esa es la intención) pero me sucede al contrario: "te está bien empleado y ojalá te ahogues".
Y teniendo en cuenta que se considera este libro el más autobiográfico de los que escribió, añadido a la fama de turbulenta de su relación con su mujer Zelda (de la que desconozco los detalles), una se pregunta si Francis trató a Zelda peor de lo que Dick trata a Nicole y escribió este libro dando su versión de lo que estaba pasando. Poniendose de bueno pero sin pasarse, no sea que vaya alguien a notar la falsedad.

I mean…it begins badly, tails off a bit in the middle, and the less said about the ending the better.

Occasionally, there are books that leave you at a loss as to how to dismiss them. Reading this I kept thinking of a line from Stoppard's The Real Thing: ‘There’s something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don’t know how to deal with you.’ Tender is the Night is not stupid, but it is, if you like, triviality made coherent. The story of a wealthy married couple going through a mid-life crisis, it's such a nothingy narrative couched in formally perfect prose that attacking it feels like swinging at a ghost – the disparity between form and content is dizzying. It's like watching Stephen Hawking spend half an hour punching something into his speech computer, only to hear it reel off a haiku about Joey Essex.

Where to start. Construction-wise, it's a complete mess; Fitzgerald realised this, and was still rearranging chapters until he died, hoping for a rehabilitation which the novel has eventually found (it was panned on release). In its original, and most commonly printed, form, the first hundred and twenty pages introduce a baffling profusion of characters with no discernible story, at which point the narrative drops back a few years to set up the main couple of Dick and Nicole, a charmless pair of socialites based fairly closely on F. Scott and Zelda.

A chronological reordering might, perhaps, solve some of the problems, although personally I would advocate cutting the opening section altogether, dropping the middle bit, and then drastically abridging the end section, so that you're left with a slim pamphlet consisting of a nice speech about the First World War, some good descriptions of Zurich, an extramarital fumble in a French hotel room, and then a speedy conclusion. Job done.

Instead it just goes on and on, retailing anecdotes about peripheral characters who seem to spend the whole book going through a series of boring encounters designed only to highlight the period's casual racism, homophobia and misogyny. It's difficult to overstress how little I cared about anyone in here. The settings – Nice, Rome, Lausanne – should provide colour, but in fact they have few distinguishing features, becoming interchangeable stops on a general American-eye view of Yurp. In Gatsby I had loved Fitzgerald's nocturnal flights of melancholy prose; here, instead, he seems to be in a sort of Hemingway mode, all flat cynicism and brittle dialogue and bitter comments about ‘the opportunistic memory of women’.

Most of all, perhaps, I hated the equation drawn between professional productivity and personal happiness. The long, drawn-out decline and fall which comprises the latter half of the novel tries to show that Dick is a failure as a man because he never completed his book and because he develops a greater affection for his children. Don't get me wrong, Dick is – well – he's a dick, isn't he – but all the same, I thought it seemed a bit unfair to argue that because he chooses not to fight to keep his adulterous wife, and instead ends up practising medicine in a tiny town in New York state, that he's somehow therefore an archetypal symbol of a wasted life.

No me ha gustado nada de nada. Me ha parecido aburrido, vacío, machista y con personajes altamente insoportables. La trama no ha conseguido engancharme en ningún momento y creo que si lo he terminado ha sido por pura inercia.

Entiendo que la idea de Fitzgerald era mostrar la decadencia de las clases altas tras la Primera Guerra Mundial, gente ociosa que se sentía intocable, a la vez que resulta ser un episodio autobiográfico de su relación con su esposa, Zelda. Pues bien, me ha sido imposible separar al autor de la obra, y he encontrado a un Fitzgerald posesivo, orgulloso, envidioso y muy machista. El personaje principal, Dick Diver, es él mismo hablando y no he podido evitar verlo de otro modo (y más después de saber ciertas cosillas desagradables sobre este escritor). He subrayado auténticas perlas del machismo, pero en cierto punto ya desistí por aburrimiento y porque se me iba a quedar el libro lleno de lápiz. No entiendo cómo alguien puede ver algo así romántico, pues para mí la toxicidad es evidente.

Me ha parecido una novela horrible en todos los sentidos, en la que no he podido desarrollar ninguna empatía ni atracción por ningún personaje, lo que me ha llevado a que me dieran igual todos y lo que les pasaba. Con los secundarios casi ni molesté en aprender los nombres, no me interesaban. Llegada a cierto punto me daba lo mismo que los arrollara un tren, que les tocara la lotería o que se torcieran un tobillo. Hay veces en que hasta los villanos me gustan más al leer un libro o ver una película, me gustan los personajes complejos y hasta con malicia, pero aquí es que son todos tan rancios y antipáticos... puff.

Encuentro que el libro tiene muchas páginas y situaciones que no me han dicho nada en absoluto. No me ha sorprendido en ningún momento, no tiene nada especial ni impactante. La primera parte es aburrida; las otras dos, prescindibles. El desenlace soso, simple, patético. Me da cierta rabia todo esto, porque creía que era un libro que me iba a gustar, pero igualmente no me arrepiento de haberlo leído, ya que quería hacerlo. De lo que me arrepiento es de haberme gastado 11 euros con él.

Ok, well, this is a hard thing to do, to give F. Scott Fitzgerald two stars. Who am I to criticize one of the (supposedly) greatest authors and literary geniuses ever? But the truth is that although I do aprecciate his excellent writing technique and many wonderful passages in this book (hence the extra star), I failed to connect with this book in any way whatsoever. I didn't care for any of the characters and their joys and sorrows left me completely unmoved. I just could not care less what happened to them and that to me is one of the greatest 'crimes' a writer can commit. I know it may very well just be me and my inability to aprecciate the great art of Fitzgerald, but reading this book added nothing to my life or to my understanding of life.(I did find many reviews online though that ecchoed exactly what I felt and thought while reading this book.) It would take too long to go into more details about why this book just didn't do it for me, so I will just leave it at that.

I have to add, however, that I will still read 'The Great Gatsby' because many of those readers who felt the way I did about 'Tender Is The Night', also said that Fitzgerald had one great book in him and Gatsby was it. I really hope so because technically and stylistically he is a great writer and could have a lot to give.

"After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of heir own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamour of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here."- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Fitzgerald has an absolutely beautiful way with words. He uses very stylized language and writes down some profound thoughts. And that’s what tricked me at first into thinking this would be a profound story. Like in The Great Gatsby, his characters are not likeable and just seem so disconnected from the world. It’s quite interesting reading Fitzgerald writing about American life in France, including black riots, at the same time that I was reading Langston Hughes The Great Big Sea: the contrast between the lives of black and white Americans in France in this period is huge.

This is a story about rich Americans in the French Riviera. The story revolves in part around Dr. Dick Diver, charming man, the ultimate host and object of adoration of teenager Rosemary, an upcoming actress, who Fitzgerald describes thus: “Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood–she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.” Attraction between the two is immediate, despite the fact that Dick is married.

I was raving about this book at first. Fitzgerald is an amazing writer and I think that his writing style initially blinded me to the flatness of the plot. The last thing I want to read is a book about privileged shallow and selfish rich people who are not introspective and just do whatever they please, but when Fitzgerald writes passages like the following, it makes it a bit easier to stomach, and fills you with hope that the characters in the book will say things you actually want to hear:

“Following a walk marked by an intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border stones she came to a space overlooking the sea where there were lanterns asleep in the fig trees and a big table and wicker chairs and a great market umbrella from Sienna, all gathered about an enormous pine, the biggest tree in the garden. She paused there a moment, looking absently at a growth of nasturtiums and iris tangled at its foot, as though sprung from a careless handful of seeds, listening to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house. When this died away on the summer air, she walked on, between kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window — until, as if the scherzo of color could reach no further intensity, it broke off suddenly in mid-air, and moist steps went down to a level five feet below.”

But they didn’t. And after part 1 of the book, which I quite liked, which at least promised more, parts 2 and 3 fell extremely flat; I was completely let down.

Part 1 of the book was basically rich people in Paris and the French Riviera, having parties and going shopping. Everything seems perfect but on the surface you are aware that some things are waiting to reveal themselves.

In part 2 we find out what’s wrong and there is discussion of mental illness which I thought was quite candid and progressive for that time. Diver is a psychiatrist who is an admirer of Freud, so there is an interesting dialogue about psychology in this book. When we learn about how Diver met his wife, I was slightly disturbing, to be honest. Diver’s character was the most complex and I’m still not sure how I feel about him. He has a predilection towards young women and patients and although I felt this book was quite progressive seeing as it discussed mental health in the 1920s, I just couldn’t, in the end, get past the superficial and superfluous characters.

Reread after decades. Also reading my friend Chris Messenger's literary criticism of this book he calls a "masterpiece," in Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities, Alabama UP, 2015, probably no longer in print. I will have more to say after I read Messenger's book, but I can say I liked it way better than I recall, a mix of romanticized ex-pat Europe, Scott and Zelda madness, alcoholism and infidelity. Sad book that in a way is like Gatsby part two, that same desire to get the girl and the American Dream but now Daisy is crazy and he is drunk and unproductive as a writer, mirroring his real life.

What I had forgotten is the romanticizing of female beauty, especially in the two central women, Nicole and Rosemary, and the romanticizing too of the male charm of Dr. Dick Diver, the psychoanalyst who finds it is easire to "be loved than love." There's some gorgeous writing he was able to finally produce after drunken mad failure after failure. It's a melancholy book.

I just looked at Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises again, another story of the "lost generation" of ex-pats, as Gertrude Stein identified them, wherein Bill goes fishing with mc Jake Barnes and his buddy Bill goes off on the whole drunken Pamplona crowd:

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”

I thought this rang true with Tender is the Night, too.

The title of the book comes from John Keats's poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," which you can read here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

The epigraph is from the melancholy poem, which Fitzgerald loved:

"Already with thee! tender is the night,
…
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways."

The essential meaning of the title is that the night is "tender," which means it is both vulnerable and nurturing. And night conceals where the light of day reveals. The characters in the novel are fragile people, needing the night to conceal their vulnerabilities. This is especially true for Nicole, damaged by her father's abuse, suffering from schizophrenia.

1.5/5 stars.
This book was a hot mess and such a disappointment compared to "The Great Gatsby" which is a favourite of mine. Right from the beginning, I had no idea where this dishevelled story was going, and having now finished it I'm still not sure what the overall point of it was.
Sure, "Tender Is the Night" comes with some beautiful passages and observations on life and people, but it also comes with a bunch of contradicting themes and destinies that all go in different directions. I get that the overall storyline is about Nicole's and Dick's marriage but I didn't really care about them. The same goes for pretty much all of the characters except for Rosemary whom I found blossoming and therefore interesting. Unfortunately, we don't get to hear much about her.
I didn't hate this book (I did finish it, after all), but I didn't like it much either. It's going to be interesting to see how my last book by Fitzgerald, "This Side of Paradise", is going to go down with me.