"Sono stati fatti bei tuffi dai trampolini più fragili"

I romanzi di Fitzgerald sono spirali di distruzione. Quando un personaggio cade a pezzi si addensa una nube di macerie finissime che ricopre il paesaggio circostante. Prendete in mano qualsiasi dei suoi libri, la polvere è la vera protagonista. E così nel dolorosissimo "Tenera è la notte". Il rapporto di Dick e Nicole non si spezza. Si dissolve. E nell'aria rimane quella polvere di sogno. Questo è quello che ti spezza il cuore: la cenere, costante memorandum di ciò che è stato, di ciò che è finito ma di cui non puoi liberarti. Come granelli di sabbia, Nicole si era inserita nelle più inacessibili pieghe del suo animo. Impossibile liberarsene. La lotta ferina ingaggiata dai due a suon di recriminazioni, sorrisi sarcastici, risate isteriche, sguardi vacui, li ha ridotti a brandelli. Il contrasto penoso tra sanità e follia, una doppia serpe che avviluppa la loro relazione, fino a soffocarli. Si riaffaccia prepotentemente la questione meschina del denaro. Nicole, bella e sfacciatamente ricca. Un doppio incantesimo, difficile da spezzare per Dick, sempre distante (come medico) e subordinato (di estrazione sociale irrimediabilmente inferiore). Nonostante tutto, percepisci il loro amore spettrale. Una catena che li tiene legati. Lui l'ha salvata. Lei gli ha regalato sprazzi di "felicità incoerente". Tenera è la notte. L'oscurità che li avvolge è dolce. "Davanti a noi, chilometri di notte".
Il romanzo a cui Fitzgerald ha lavorato nove anni, il suo lavoro più ambizioso, più maturo. Ricco di riferimenti autobiografici, situazioni topiche della sua letteratura (incidenti in macchina, narratori esterni ingenui, confronti tra gli amanti, uno romantico, l'altro rozzo), riferimenti autoreferenziali che richiameranno più di un deja-vu alla mente del lettore affezionato. Proprio per questo gli ho preferito Gatsby. Struttura più coesa, meno limacciosa. In più punti, l'angoscia e l'estrema dilatazione temporale dell'agonia dei personaggi ti procura quel pruriginoso fastidio che ti spinge ad allontanarti dal romanzo. Tuttavia sono stati solo dei momenti trascurabili: la maturazione artistica dello scrittore è evidente, lo stile impareggiabile. Il solito magnifico Fitzgerald.
"Come un'indifferenza costantemente alimentata o lasciata a se stessa si trasforma in un vuoto, così lui aveva imparato a essere vuoto di Nicole, comportandosi con lei con negazione e distacco sentimentale. Si parla di cicatrici guarite, una vaga similitudine tratta dalla patologia della pelle, ma nella realtà non esiste una cosa simile. Esistono ferite aperte, a volte piccole come una puntura di spillo, ma sono pur sempre ferite. I segni della sofferenza possono essere paragonati al massimo alla perdita di un dito o di un occhio; potremmo non perderli mai, nemmeno per un minuto all'anno, ma se capitasse non ci sarebbe più nulla da fare"

This is my favorite Fitzgerald book. I read it back to back with This Side of Paradise last year, which was an interesting experiment. I had the young, beautiful, self-confident Fitzgerald and the Fitzgerald of post-Zelda's craziness, dark dark alcoholic Fitzgerald. Besides showing obviously how much his skills had improved, it showed the sheer range he was capable of as well. This is a dark, depressing novel. Loss, loneliness, isolation, desolation. It does not end well. But the sheer power of the prose, and just how completely lost everything is here can't fail to get to you. The story is so tight, well put together, flows along without a hitch. It sinks you slowly lower and lower and lower until you're hardly aware of just how dark of a place the novel has gone. And then all of a sudden things evaporate, and there you are. Just like Fitzgerald. Wandering off the last page.

Really. I recommend it to everyone. Do give it a try.

I have a lot of feelings about this book and about Scott and Zelda's relationship, which was the basis of this story.

First of all, I think his writing is a mess. It's often in need of a good edit and here is no different. The chapters were shuffled around, looking for an order to make it work and finally settled with flashbacks, rather than a linear order. While I think that was the right decision, you can see that chapters could be chopped and changed and often read independently of one another. Perhaps this is a consequence of writing short stories and always having good snippets of a story, but never quite knowing how to link them all together.

Of the essence of the novel, it's pure Scott and Zelda. So much so, that he reportedly stole sections of her own novel for this book, instead of passing it straight to the publishers, while she was being treated for manic depression. She often accused him of stealing ideas from her diaries throughout their marriage and true or not, he obviously used aspects of their life together. In Tender is the Night, we encounter heavy drinking, numerous affairs, furious rows and episodes of mental illness, all of which are well documented parts of their life. It's painfully intrusive, as we watch two broken people start to crack and for the first time, instead of turning to one another, they begin to drift apart.

I think it's his best book, in all of it's rawness. Gatsby is a well constructed masterpiece, but this is the reality that came out of the other side.

Time is our most valuable commodity. Had enough of this!, Dick is precisely one of those, Rosemary is leaving me with clammy hands of bored annoyance, and Nicole appears to be living on another planet.

Two reasons why the two stars,
Beautiful sounding title
The French Riviera

Two reasons that stopped me trowing this out the window in frustration,
It's a borrowed book (from a rather charming lady)
Wouldn't want to knock somebody out on the sidewalk, I am on the fourth floor!

I remember a long time ago watching and loving the BBC series of this. It wasn’t as good as the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited but it’s the only other TV book adaptation that has stayed with me from that period.

Finally I read the novel. It’s true it’s a bit messy at the beginning – it took him more than ten years to write and he was often drunk during that period – but once people stop shooting each other and it sharpens into the story of the break up of Dick and Nicole’s marriage it’s just heartbreakingly beautiful. Fitzgerald’s prose is often breathtakingly gorgeous. It might not be as structurally sound as Gatsby but I found it more emotionally engaging.

“Dick percepiva l’infelicità di Nicole e avrebbe voluto bere la pioggia che le sfiorava le guance”.

(Rilettura).

It took Fitzgerald so long to write this novel that it’s inevitably flawed. It seems to me he began with a view to distancing himself from himself and Dick Diver was conceived as a fictional character modelled on someone Fitzgerald knew. However as the novel progresses Diver becomes more and more Fitzgerald himself and the novel becomes ever more autobiographical. This is what ultimately gives it its beautiful heartbreaking quality – it’s the fictionalised story of Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda. Though Gatsby is undoubtedly a much better novel in terms of construction and economy Tender has an emotional power Gatsby lacks. It’s a novel that captures poignantly the diminishing returns of youthful optimism and vitality, of young love, and as such one of the most beautifully sad novels I have ever read. One’s heart goes out to poor Dick Diver.

2.5 stars

Of course, it doesn't matter what the author really meant to say. Reading Richard Godden's introduction though, it was quite comforting to me to remember that it doesn't matter what scholars think the text means, or author meant, either. Or the press. "A tragedy backlit by beauty" is the highlighted quote.

What tragedy? There is a 'tragedy' here, if that word, so empty of agency, so forgiving and concealing, can be used for a rape. But I don't think that's what's meant; they mean poor Dick, emptied of his potency. For Godden he's the old economic order, and his demise has a racialised edge. Nicole, the abuse survivor, gets out, though uncertainly, like a butterfly, into the new economic age. The Great Depression is subtly foreshadowed, gives a mood to the last chapters

But sorry, I don't see tragedy, I don't feel for Dick, though maybe the branded, consumer-driven new order is a scourge and I should join Fitzgerald (in whom Godden sees Marxism and class loyalty warring) in mourning the old way of being wealthy in wasting time gloriously... Oh demon drink! Oh thoughtless, unthinking Woman! Oh heartless, greedy, craven world!

No, I won't have it. I'm with Augustine, the cook, waving the kitchen knife, dismissed for helping herself to Chablis, calling Dick on his alcoholism, fearless of police, demanding her wages, calling up to Nicole 'Au revoir Madame! Bonne chance!' Fitzgerald is ambivalent, but I seize the half-felt words. Bonne chance, Nicole, get out from under. Even if he cannot give her a mind, I am with her.

There is something too, almost, when Dick goes to 'cure' a young man of homosexuality - Fitzgerald appreciates at least, that it can't be done.

This was an unwitting re-read: many years ago I must have taken this out of the library and read it without noticing. I like to think these days I am more awake, no longer lullayed by the susurrous lyres and viols of Fitzgerald's sentences or distracted by the plangent grief for Dick. This time a part of me answers back, sympathising with the wrong people, with Baby Warren's will, her singleness; her ugly power-wielding, despised by Dick, rationalised by the desiccating, sexist gaze of the omnipotent author, changes in my heart. You did not see her! You made her for your sport.

But I read Fitzgerald sympathetically not only for his seeming helplessness and honesty, for sending out a vital voice from the depths of affluenza, but also for the sweetness of that voice. And he does not aestheticise wealth I think, but feeling, for the sake of communication. Do readers envy his suffering rich? I think not. But we feel for them. There is something here, some kind of struggle, a half-lucid dream to interpret.

So 'backlit' by beauty also sounds wrong to me. There is the light of beauty here, but lighting the 'tragedy' is some other illumination, like the unwholesome glow of the movies with their unreal 'faces of girl-children'. The experimental abstraction, the theatrical entry of Dick into the movie studio, reflects the dream-darkness of the mind probed by the rising field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Dick's field. White-supremacist capitalist patriarchy projected itself into that darkness - do I detect a part of Fitzgerald trying to... at least... let it be dark?

3.50 Stars (round down) — I grabbed this from one of my many recent #bookhaul trips to Savers recently, largely as it was referenced by a certain psychotic stalker that is also an insatiable book-lover, and expert — seen on Netflix. You know whom I mean. Anyways, I’m so glad I got into this one, it’s an excellent read and nearly a rounded-up 4⭐️ but the verbosity and few too many ‘wordy’ passages just had me rounding down. But make no mistake, Fitzgerald’s classic is a worthy investment, layered and beautifully executed.

Tender is the Night, is a complex & emotionally charged novel that explores the glamour and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. The story follows the rise & inevitable fall of Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple whose marriage is threatened by their individual struggles with mental illness and some ferociously indulged infidelity.

Fitzgerald's prose really is captivatingly beautiful and evocative, transporting the reader to the luxurious locales of the French Riviera and the Italian coast. As Fitzgerald writes, "On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April." However, the author's tendency towards verbosity can at times make the story feel bogged down by unnecessary details and tangents.

The characters are flawed, human and definitively multidimensional, with their own ambitions & insecurities that drive & anchor their actions. As Fitzgerald writes of Nicole, "He felt he knew her, as if he could reach out and touch her and yet she remained just beyond his grasp." While the portrayal of mental illness may be considered dated and stigmatizing by modern standards, it is nevertheless a significant aspect of the novel's exploration of human nature and relationships.

One of the most compelling aspects of Tender is the Night is its commentary on the destructive nature of wealth and excess. The lavish parties and extravagant lifestyles of the characters serve as a stark contrast to the underlying emotional turmoil and instability that plague them. As Fitzgerald writes, "The strongest guarded secret within the immigration files is the fact that the hopeful immigrant who seeks the life of the New World and the endless opportunities of America is not an American at all, but a European in search of something more permanent than a revolution."

In the end, Tender is the Night is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that delves into the complexities of human relationships, mental illness, as well as the corrosive effects of excess. While its length and verbosity may be a barrier for some readers — there really is a bit of waffle in parts — its themes and well crafted characters make it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the literature of the Jazz Age.

✨✨ I didn’t want to read it after the actress shows up because of course I knew there was going to be an affair. Everyone knows at least that much about the novel. I liked it the way it was before Rosemary arrived in France - Dick and a perfectly lovely Nicole having a great relationship and getting along just fine. It was upbeat and beautiful. And then Dick fell for Rosemary and everything fell apart. Nicole will marry again after the smoke and ashes but Dick won’t and it left me feeling sad and flat. I’m told this was based on Scott Fitzgerald’s own smashed relationship which made it all even sadder.

✨ Scott’s writing is exquisite, it really is a feast to sit down at his writing table and get pulled into his stories.

This sounds like exactly the audio book I need right now...let's check it out!

With the popularity of Fitzgerald, it's difficult to comprehend that he only wrote four novels, this being the last. It's a dark novel because it was written at a dark time in his life. Zelda's illness, financial problems, and alcoholism all contributed to Fitzgerald's frame of mind. I've read several negative reviews of this novel here on Goodreads saying it is depressing, the characters are shallow and unlikeable. That may be partly true, but their struggles and problems, their desires and betrayals, are what make them so compelling and so real. One has to take context into consideration when reading a novel, especially the time period when the novel was written and set. Also the mentality of this set of people and the lifestyle they lived is almost incomprehensible to the average person today. It was a great read for me. I give it 4.5 stars, I can't quite put it on the same level as The Great Gatsby.