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Splendid book!!

Page 2:
In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality.

Page 20:
"A classic," suggested Anthony, "is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion..."

Page 50:
The growth of intimacy is like that, Fisrt one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humour. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third - before long the best lines cancel out - and the secret is exposed at last...

Page 58:
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after these alleviation of some especially intense misery.


5* Tender Is the Night
5* The Love of the Last Tycoon
5* The Great Gatsby
4* The Crack-Up
3* The Ice Palace
3* Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
4* The Last Tycoon
1* Thank You for the Light
3* Tales of the Jazz Age
3* Financing Finnegan
2* This Side of Paradise
2* An Alcoholic Case
2* Three hours between planes
4* The Beautiful and Damned
TBR Flappers and Philosophers

Being bulky compared to Scott's other gems, may arouse faint hopes of an epic. The Beautiful and the Damned isn't quite that, but it does plumb the entrails of a relationship. The novel isn't about seltzer and sernades, nor invitations and the celebrity pages. It is about the sweet insomnia of expectations and the early chafing where discord gulps heavily. FSF gnaws within these pages. This isn't Homeric like Tender Is The Night. This is a novel of tingles and unexplained bruises. It is worth most people's time.

I found this book fascinating and also really problematic. Fitzgerald's class prejudices and racism are on parade, and it's a horrifying parade. It's much less censored than in *Gatsby*, and in that sense it's more interesting. Fitzgerald surveys and mocks different "types," social and racial, and in that catalog we glimpse what moves and terrifies *his* kind. So when his hero and heroine start to come apart, we understand that it's bigger than Anthony's alcoholism or Gloria's spending . . . there is something rotten at the core of their world.

It's really interesting to note how Anthony's troubles presage Fitzgerald's own. These are the best and most convincing parts of the book, too. Actually, the degeneracy is a bit harrowing at times, but sometimes I enjoy a good harrowing.

Fitzgerald really understands both privilege and failure, and so if you're interested in this combination, The Beautiful and Damned is an excellent exploration of the two.

You’re not supposed to like the characters in this book, and Fitzgerald never tries to make you. They’re lazy, spoiled, and racist people that bring about their own misfortune and lack any sense of compassion for others. Their selfishness causes them to be damned, as it were.
It was an interesting book to read, even though I was not too fond of the characters themselves. The beginning was a little slow as well, but it got considerably better from there.
I’m glad both Fitzgerald’s writing and character development got better over the years. Reading this right after The Last Tycoon really showed me how much he had improve.

Accidentally deleted my pre-review but I thought this book was called "The Beautiful and The Damned" until like two days ago-

לסקירה מפורטת בעברית, קישור לבלוג שלי -

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

What is special about this novel is the author’s ability to make the most despicable of characters interesting. The reader is jogged into another world. There are two central characters – Anthony and Gloria. I never came close to feeling even the slightest pinch of empathy for either. Their values are opposite to my own. I sat and watched, fixated, glued to the end, but not for a second thinking that either my views or theirs would change. It is like watching a train crash.

So why did I watch? I watched because Fitzgerald, through his words, has the ability to capture an era, a group of people and places as through a movie camera. We observe millions of small thing each perfectly portrayed - light slanting through blinds, nasty arguments, NYC on a hot summer night, cocktail parties with insipid, meaningless chatter. The reader recognizes a world that does exist. I liked this realism and it is this that drew me to the book. It is the author’s writing that I like.

At the same time, the writing is definitely patchy. There are sections that are a total bore. The beginning is horrible. It took me quite a while before I knew I would not abandon the book.

Anthony is lazy, self-centered and shallow. Gloria she is lazy, self-centered and shallow too. Anthony does not want a vocation; he can’t possibly think of anything he wants to do. No goals and no aspirations, except maybe having a beautiful wife by his side, alcohol in unlimited quantity and being entertained by others. Gloria, for her beauty is everything. Her guiding principle is to never do anything for another. You don’t give a damn about me and I don’t give a damn about you – that is her life philosophy in a nutshell. The two are married. They are waiting for an inheritance from Anthony’s grandfather. An inheritance that will give them millions and insure that they need never work or do anything that doesn’t please them. And if that dream comes true, what then?

There is humor to be found in the lines. It is cynical. It is full of irony. Intellectualism is scoffed at. Here follow some examples:
-They were in love with generalities.
-Happiness is only the first seconds after the alleviation of misery.
-I don’t care about truth; I want happiness.
-I don’t want to spend money in driblets.
-His imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialog.
-Everyone had something to talk about and they all enjoyed it. (This was about war.)

Not all of the humor is serious though. Try this:
-10 o’clock bumped stuffily into 11.
What I am saying again, in just another way, is that the writing has a style of its own and it is special.

Just so you are warned - the book is a product of its own time. It was published in 1922 and draws the era before and after the First World War. It has racist lines. What is assumed and taken for granted then does not represent how we think today. Well, for most of us.

The audiobook is narrated by William Dufris. He turns this into a theatre production. I would have preferred a simple reading of the lines. He dramatizes; he interprets the text for you. I’d rather think for myself. (My trick for getting around this is to repeat the lines in my head, thereby squashing the narrator’s exasperating intonations.) I have to admit though, that at times he did have me laughing. I kind of got used to the narration; while at the beginning it drove me nuts, by the end I was desensitized.

So what am I thinking as I complete the book? You simply cannot change people! Is that what Fitzgerald wanted to say? I have read that the book is based on his life with Zelda. Is he observing and recording? The book certainly has something to say about work and life goals, but this message is so obvious there has to be more.

I still think that Fitzgerald is one of the most fantastic writers of the 20th century. His books are romantic and introspective in a way that has been almost completely lost to the contemporary moment. He writes of two people in this book who are almost synonymous with the age they lived in whose story is summed up in the title in a way that is not revealed to the reader until the book's end - The Beautiful and the Damned, a metaphor for the US in the '20s and '30s - a culture at its highest, dropped to its lowest. It is dificult to articulate exactly how this book made me feel. I was elated at the begining, reveling in the beauty of the start and the language by which these aristrats lives are lived - the finery of a life a leisure. But by the end of the book, given the dramatic and unexpected language of these protagonists damnation, I was left deflated and resentful of the author who dropped me so low from such a beautiful height of the elevated language I was provided with earlier. I believe this is the ingenious affect of a brilliant, if not always compelling writer.

I think it's time to admit Fitzgerald is simply not for me. I found this book incredibly boring, and had to struggle to even find a plot somewhere. It's basically stupid people wasting money they don't have. Either there's some social criticism in there that I simply don't get or… Well.

But aside from that, two things really annoyed me.

First, the racism. Even if we explain it away as a product of it's time, I thought it was just overdone.

Then, there were the women and their characterization. Take these quotes, for instance:

The biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts. and ends when her last child is laid in her arms.

It seemed that he had always given in and that in her heart she had despised him for it. Ah, she might hate him now, but afterward she would admire him for his dominance.

All I think of ever is that I love you," she wailed. "I value my body because you think it's beautiful. And this body of mine -of yours- to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It's simply intolerable." … "You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity." "What if I do? It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for"

"Hit me!" she implored him- wildly, stupidly. "Oh, hit me, and I'll kiss the hand you hit me with."

So. Yeah. I did not enjoy this book. And it's the last Fitzgerald I'll ever try…

"It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream."

I can't think of any writer other F. Scott Fitzgerald that has had such of a yo-yo effect on me. I thought 'Gatsby' was the real deal, 'This Side of Paradise' I gave up on, some of his short stories left a big impression on me, whereas, 'Tender Is the Night' felt like a bit of a mess. I put this down to his personal life, which wasn't exactly plain sailing. 'The Beautiful and Damned' sits comfortably in-between this lot, lounged in the Ritz-carlton to be precise. With a cigarette in one hand, and a cocktail glass in the other, not worrying about the tab, at least for now.

Regardless of how I perceived much of his work, one thing about him does stands out, he WAS the voice of a generation. My first experience with Fitzgerald was something completely new, like tasting champagne for the first time, or putting on an expensive suit. The whole experience was plush, sensuous and dazzling. Although I didn't think the story here was that great, his writing at least felt less floppy and more tightly focused, not too far off Gatsby standard. Written during the golden age of jazz, his second novel looks at the rise and fall of young couple Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, through their first meeting, courtship, and marriage. Like with all Fitzgerald's characters they are complex when it comes to relationships, and draws comparisons to the problems of himself and wife Zelda.

At the core of it's story along with the couple, is money, and the problems of overspending, or living beyond ones means. Antony & Gloria live the high life, spending well at every opportunity, but eventually realizing their funds are dwindling. This is where Antony's ever so rich grandfather comes into play, he hopes to get his hands on a large fortune as Inheritance, but to his dismay is not written into the will, the couple start to feel the strain. With their bank balances and each other.
It is a novel not of disillusion but of decay. What happens to the kind of people that Anthony and Gloria are has happened to the same kind of people over and over again. In our foolish optimism, our pride and certainty in progress, we like to forget that disintegration is a competing and often victorious force. And so, when we see signs of something uncommonly like it in the young generation, we think it has never happened before, the setting changes, of course, but since Fitzgerald has described our modern setting with its prohibition parties, socialites and promiscuous kissing in such magnanimous detail, we are apt to think that, because the scenery is startling, the scenario is a new one.

Anthony Patch is built up in pages which, while blazing with clever irony, do not give us a picture of him in three dimensions. Later we find him using that mixture of standing aside and telling us what he says and does and acting as his intimate psychological confidant, which often betrays. Within rather large limits Anthony is clear, but clear as a type rather than a person. The most telling accounts of him, while real, could also seem real of other persons quite different from him in other ways. Gloria, admirably sharp and witty at first, deliquesces and loses her personality as Fitzgerald grows intimate with her, until toward the end we find her speaking very little as problems start to mount. She too, broadens into a person with too many characteristics which other characters could share with her and still be differential. The treatment of the two of them leaves the curious impression that Fitzgerald was at first inside Anthony's head before gradually exchanging positions. Also minor characters written about actually felt sharper than that of Antony and Gloria, even though in the novel they are limited to scenes here and there.

There is the very small allowance for tenderness and proper love here, and even less of pity, contained within there is a lot of hatred and boiled over arguments that I guess goes with the territory. It's lively with epigrams, so many that one half suspects that their origin is less in a perpetually ironic state of mind than in a facility and joy in turning them out. He did get the fine line of using enough energy and weariness spot on in all the right places, and I really liked the last 30 or so pages, but the couple I seemed to love one minute and semi-despised the next. Had they lived in the 21st century, they would have racked up huge debts on twenty credit cards, whilst both having about five on-line affairs apiece.

Well written, with some great moments, but over all it just lacked that something extra.
3.5/5 - minus the tip.

Didn't do much for me.
For some reason i can't quite explain i haven't liked any of Fitzgerald's books except The Great Gatsby.
Was this guy actually just a one hit wonder?