I was initially skeptical about this story – I chose it nearly randomly when presented with the list of titles, as I hadn’t looked up any of them to see what they were. However, after the first chapter, I was engrossed in the story and read it intently through the end. I was slightly disappointed when it ended! I would recommend it, but only to specific audiences mature enough to grasp the concepts, as the story would not carry the same weight. At least to me, had I not had the emotional maturity/experience to understand some more profound meanings.

Iniziamo con il dire che "Belli e dannati" non è affatto un libro scorrevole, in quanto in alcuni punti, è prolisso e ripetitivo, anche a causa del fatto che è una storia statica, in cui sono pochi i colpi di scena.
"Belli e dannati" è il resoconto, la storia di due personaggi, quali Anthony Patch e Gloria Gilbert, nei quali si possono intravedere le figure di Francis Scott Fitzgerald e della moglie, Zelda.
"Belli e dannati" è il crollo delle illusioni, della mancanza di significato della vita, della bellezza effimera, di una America che si basa sulla sostanza e molte serate spese tra alcool e feste, come sono soliti trascorrerle i due protagonisti.
In questa opera, Fitzgerald si rivela molto abile a raccontare il vissuto di entrambi i personaggi, a farci vivere il dolore, il decadimento umano e morale, la decadenza e la digressione di due giovani, belli sì, ma dannati, deteriorati nel corpo e nell'anima, a causa del denaro, come racconta anche la Pivano nella prefazione al romanzo.

Maybe 2.5. I didn't love this one. It felt messy and poorly structured in comparison with The Great Gatsby, and the characters really didn't grab me.

The Beautiful and Damned: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age as a ‘generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned continuous the exploration of that ‘lost generation’ and is largely inspired by his troublesome marriage with Zelda. To me, The Beautiful and Damned seems the most depressing of all of his novels. The general atmosphere of futility, waste, lack of purpose is overwhelming. The feeling that there is no point in doing anything is almost painful. In his second novel Fitzgerald is already at his best – skillfully portraying a generation of decay, where the cult towards pleasure and money has destroyed morality.

Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...

4-4.5

I read about Fitzgerald's life afterwards and I realized that Gloria and Anthony were heavily inspired by Zelda and him. That is heartbreaking, but also brutally honest if it's true. The ending was fitting and kinda unexpected, the story was depressing, but it depicted the war-post-war jazz era realistically and without restraint and embellishments.

Decades before the Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old” there was Fitzgerald and The Beautiful and Damned. For its two main characters 25 is middle aged and the curtain of old age drops rudely and irrevocably at 30. Fitzgerald, still in his mid-twenties when he wrote this novel of a young couple who burn the candle too brightly at one end, thinking romantically that it is both ends, knew, as Townsend did, that “getting old” was a mental state, not a chronological one. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert aren’t so metaphorical in their thinking. Youth is beauty and beauty is all and being rich greases the wheels of decline by allowing life to be a party as long as one can afford it. The one end they light is the alcoholic end of fast movement, talk, and drink, intended to brush back Death’s herald to the young, rich and spoiled: Boredom. They are easily bored not because the world is so, though they stand by its meaninglessness quite determinedly as a reasonable substitute for boredom, but because they are. In the end they are without ideas or argument. They have youth and a tragically ticking clock.

The time of the novel is the second decade of the 20th century, which begins with them students, and continues into the years of the Great War, which they miss, and then on into the first years of the 20s, by which time they are in full decline, Anthony actually 30 and through almost all of his wealth, and Gloria approaching 30 and offended beyond words at being mistaken for 30. The Jazz Age is about to dawn, the Roaring Twenties about to roar, but these two are already washed up, desperately hoping for a contested will to deliver Anthony’s grandfather’s millions their way. Fitzgerald is not as polished or as succinctly brilliant as he will be in The Great Gatsby, but he impressively makes you care at least a little about two selfish people with little to recommend them beside their own sense of entitlement.

His description of Manhattan is vivid, often poetic. The dialogue mostly sparkles. If you never quite develop full tragic empathy for the two main characters you do for Fitzgerald. It is a shockingly prescient description of his own descent into alcoholism, bankruptcy, and a mental breakdown. Anthony is always re-drawing the line of reform, when he will cut back on his drinking, their reckless spending and partying, their delayed consideration of meaningful employment. They and others recognize their self-destructiveness but they ignore each other’s warnings and feel betrayed by those of their friends. They fall from drinking for pleasure to drinking for escape to drinking for numbness, from parties at the Plaza to anonymous O’Neillian bars to their own empty apartment. It is a sad, glittery tale of two wasted lives but a tragic preview of a great novelist’s end.

I found the introduction (written by Pagan Harleman) to be helpful and accurate - this novel is not a perfect work of art. However, it is truly original, as Fitzgerald incorporates and mixes different styles of writing; I understand why it is a classic.

I additionally found it fascinating to monitor how some of the characters would parallel Fitzgerald’s personal life in their downfall. I consider the dialogue to be the strongest point of this book.

It is truly enticing to be able to witness the deterioration of a character, which this novel portrays best. The language is beautiful - my vocabulary has been expanded. Fitzgerald is a literary master.

Фицджералд пише красиво и мъдро. Той не се прокрадва в душата, а влиза с гръм и трясък. Настанява се и край - ето ти любов завинаги. Толкова беше вълнуващо да чета Красиви и прокълнати (повече ми харесва от Гетсби), че препрочитах по няколко пъти много страници, виждах героите му и мисля за тях. Чудя се как може да е бил толкова мъдър, талантлив, чувствителен и толкова млад и прокълнат. Искам да познавам този човек, искам да ми приятел. Искам да му звъня вечер и да му споделям, да плача точно на неговото и да знам, че ме разбира. Това прави Фицджералд - оживява всеки път като го четеш и ти обещава, че не си сам. И ти дава надежда, че все пак някои хора са с красив ум и дълбока душа за толкова много хиляди други, които трябва да търпиш. Огромно благодаря на Фицджералд. Казвам му наздраве с цялата ми любов.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a brilliant stylist… He is full of wicked irony and he depicts his hero or his fictional alter ego as an ironic young man…

As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

The hero is filled with ambitions, ideas and ideals… But actually he is absolutely idle and self-indulgent…

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle…

The world is a vanity fair… And then he meets her – the woman of his destiny…

…the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold – but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.

The radiant hour of their wedding… First happy months of marriage… Slow evaporation of magic…

Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.

The novel reads as a revenge on the years of the author’s lost youth…
First disappointments… Quarrels… Hiding from the world in drunkenness… Gradually they were growing more and more distant from each other… The war… Wretched service in the army… Coming back… Their marriage becomes something like a bad habit…

After that reflowering of tenderness and passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed, from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what they knew at last was gone.

Love is blind and love blinds those who fall victim to it.

"The Beautiful and Damned" is the perfect title for this novel, as well as for the author's life with his wife Zelda.

This is Fitzgerald's second novel, and he had become wealthy and famous. His protagonist and his wife--Anthony and Gloria Patch--move in a circle of rich, hard-drinking sybarites, who seem to move glibly from party to party. (On the first edition dust jacket, Anthony and Gloria are painted as Scott & Zelda)

Anthony doesn't want to work. After graduating from Harvard, he wanders around Europe for a few years, before moving to New York City to live. He finds a nice apartment, and lives well on his allowance, while waiting for his industrialist grandfather to die, at which point he'll be a bazillionaire.

He meets Gloria, the young, beautiful cousin of his Harvard chum, Dick, and is smitten. As is she: the couple marry, enjoy a protracted honeymoon, and settle back into NYC's pre-War party scene.

Gradually, their life together crumbles. The only consistent motifs are A) that they don't want to work, and B) that their investments are not producing enough income to cover their lifestyle.

When Anthony's grandfather finally does die, he leaves not a dime to Anthony.

All-too-soon, World War One looms, and Anthony applies, with his friends Maury and Dick, to go to officer training school. Anthony fails the medical.

This doesn't prevent him from being drafted later, and he's shipped south for basic training.

Far from home, Anthony finds affection in the arms of Dot, a local girl.

The war ends before Anthony's unit can be shipped overseas, and he and Gloria are reunited. They quarrel over money, and find any excuse to drink, which seems the only way they can tolerate life and each other. They wait for Anthony's lawsuit against his grandfather's estate to settle.

Their apartments get smaller, their clothes less-trendy and more frayed, and the need for alcoholic oblivion even stronger.

What is disturbing about "The Beautiful and Damned" is how loathsome Fitzgerald obviously finds this society, especially himself.

At one point, Anthony is talking to Dick--an author of great success--and Dick talks of how vapid modern fiction is, and how everyone asks him whether he's read "This Side of Paradise." Dick decries how detestible the characters in "Paradise" are.

"This Side of Paradise," of course, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel.

It's obvious that Fitzgerald and Anthony are both alcoholic, and that Gloria--like Zelda--is both a big drinker, and suffering from early stages of mental illness.

Things hit rock-bottom: Anthony has bounced checks, and been thrown out of a club where he and his friends once held court. They're at the absolute bottom. Then he wins his lawsuit. He's rich again, but we sense--as the book concludes with Anthony and Gloria aboardship for Italy--that he really didn't "win" anything at all.

This is not an easy book to read. Its tale of the bon vivant who loses everything reminded me of "The Magnificent Ambersons," but this was just so much sadder. Maybe part of it is knowing how similar is the author's life, that just three years later, he would publish "The Great Gatsby," which made it impossible for him ever to turn back.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote beautifully; he lived too fast, and died too young. Maybe that tragic darkness makes his sentences shine that much brighter.

This couple...so reminiscent of Scott and Zelda.