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.

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.

This was a little bit choppy and largely autobiographical, from what I understand. The ability was there, waiting to be developed, but his organizational skills weren't so hot.

I loved this passage:

"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

We can all relate, and I've never heard it said better by any other writer.

here is my original short review of this book from a hundred years ago (both when it was published and when i wrote about it):

"i read it in pieces during the summer, and it was good brain food in the middle of wispy beach fiction."

i used to actually, like, try at this. there was a time when i didn't just crack weird jokes and talk about myself.

weird.

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

One of the least likable "protagonists" I've ever read. That being said, the writing was wonderful and he did grow as a character, at least somewhat, in the end. If Fitzgerald was trying to so me how horrible and shallow young men of privilege are...mission accomplished.

The circumstances of the novel have blurred over the years. It is certain that I finished the book at a White Castle, perhaps avoiding aspects of my life which had veered problematic. I recall highballs, many of them. The drinks were in the novel, of course. My own problems involved living in the wrong place and that finding the reciprocity of a relationship was corroding my self-esteem. There is an echo of that within the pages. That was a funny time. Does my smile appear forced?

A delicious study of disillusionment and intellectual awakening that captures the mindsets of the Lost Generation who grew up in the aftermath of the First World War.



This Side of Paradise focuses on the life of Amory Blaine, a personage to become. He's a pretty narcissistic dude whom we get to watch grow up and work on his education as he struggles to find his place in the world and adjusts expectations to reality.

It adds to the reading experience if you know that this was highly inspired by Fitzgerald's personal life. It's his debut novel after all, written by someone in his early twenties. These are tumultuous and formative times in everyone's life, but in this particular case the backdrop formed a dramatic on-off-relationship with Zelda Sayre. You can definitely feel the rumble and the worries on these pages, which adds complexity to this work.

I highly enjoy the kind of bildungsroman this was. We've got a never-ending supply of coming-of-age stories and most of them begin with a highly flawed or uneducated character that over the course of the novel has some sort of awakening or learning experience and ends up a better man as the result of it. Here, Amory too has his different learning curves, but there's more confusion and frustration involved. We're presented an idealistic guy who has to grow up during a World War, who tries to use education in order to gain status, and who is intrigued by wealth to a fault. He's not even particularly likeable, and yet you can't help but watch his every step.

I think it's interesting this is said to reflect the voice of a generation, as it is quite specific. Surely there are lives lived very similarly to the way Amory handles his, but he's a young man with a wealthy background who leaves his home to study at Princeton and have long and explorative meetings with similar people. It's a specific type of person that's represented here, which is the white, privileged, male, Ivy-league type – there's certainly quality and value in that, but I for example can't say that I found myself represented in here (and I doubt a 1920s version of myself would have) and others much less.

It's surprisingly experimental structurally. It's clearly the work of an author who is still trying things out and looking for his way of expression. The novel consists of long prose passages, but also incorporates poems and letters as well as (to me the most surprising bits –) little one-act plays. Some might call it scattered or unfocussed, but I really enjoyed that! To me, the shifting and indecisive narrative structure reflected the searching and longing of the protagonist well.

To end this, I want to say that there are some truly beautiful words in here. Just stylistically, Fitzgerald to me is a wonder. There are several phrases, so casually thrown in here that made me stop and think.

"For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror."

Do you get what I mean when I call this delicious? We all like to claim that love is selfless, but Fitzgerald has recognised that there's vanity in offering your heart to someone. You might love them, but you won't be able to get enough of how they make you view yourself. Self-exploration definitely is a never ending journey, both for Amory Blaine as well as for the reader.

So, I hadn't read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald besides The Great Gatsby and I'd been meaning to give some of his other work a try. I was in the car for a long time the other day and a copy of this book was lying on the floor so I just picked it up and started reading it. In the end ... it was just okay, in my opinion.

I think Fitzgerald writes beautifully, but I felt that this book was really lacking in terms of plot/story. I think books about day-to-day life can certainly be interesting, but in this case I couldn't bring myself to care about the protagonist. He's essentially just a conceited asshole––and he's supposed to be, as far as I can tell ... but even though conceited assholes can be interesting characters, I just wasn't invested in Amory's story. And none of the characters really interested me, for that matter. There were a lot of minor characters that just came and went and didn't seem to serve a lot of purpose.

On top of that, I found the pacing awkward; months or years would go by in the span of a paragraph or two, and a lot of it read like a summary rather than an actual story. There were also long streams of poetry and a random section written in play format, and those parts were kind of tedious to get through.

Over all, I had mixed feelings about this book. I loved the writing for the most part, and I kind of see what Fitzgerald was trying to get at, but it just didn't work for me. I still hope to try his other books, though.

This Side of Paradise primarily suffers from not being The Great Gatsby. And while I know that This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's first foray into writing, The Great Gatsby is most people's first foray into Fitzgerald. People have expectations, you know? This Side of Paradise just doesn't measure up. One of TSoP's main flaws is that it has virtually no plot. It does contain the rare snippets of brilliance, but you have to wade through a whole lot of tosh to find them. Still, I can't say that I hated it, however, I've definitely had naps that were more stimulating.

An Apprentice Work, With Flashes Of Genius



This Side Of Paradise was Fitzgerald’s first novel, the one that made him, at age 23, a literary star, the unofficial chronicler of the flapper era. It was such a success that his ex-girlfriend, Zelda Sayre, agreed to marry him. And we know how that turned out.

Autobiographical protagonist Amory Blaine is insufferably narcissistic and egotistical. Fitzgerald was clearly aware of this, and there’s more than a bit of satire to his portrait of the vain golden boy; he titled an earlier version The Romantic Egotist. Structurally, the book is all over the place, a collection of vignettes, impressions, poems… there’s even something resembling a one-act play near the end. WWI is oddly glossed over in an interlude.

It’s a coming of age novel with an experimental feel; at one point Fitzgerald refers to Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, and you can sense its influence, especially in the second half.

The book covers Amory’s comfortable midwest childhood, his Princeton years and the restless post-war Jazz Age generation. Throughout there’s the search for all those things you rhapsodize about when you’re very young: love, beauty, spirituality, fulfillment. The narrator occasionally drones on, telling us stuff, like some pedantic teaching assistant outlining a course.

But while the book is clearly, at times painfully, an apprentice work, it shows a ton of potential; you can see why legendary editor Maxwell Perkins agreed to publish it, despite the protests of his less enthusiastic colleagues at Scribner’s.

The book has an undeniable vitality, a spark of originality and the occasional flash of genius. You feel that Fitzgerald is attempting to capture his generation, one unshackling itself from pre-war mores. What it needs is a Nick Carraway figure, an outsider among the privileged to comment on the action. Amory is living in the eye of his own dramatic hurricane, and it’s hard to get a balanced point of view.

What’s eerie, though, is how many prescient passages there are. Like this one:

n  “Amory, you’re young. I’m young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you.”n

Indeed he does.

Also included is one post-breakup bender that foreshadows the author’s later alcoholism. An elegiac feeling suffuses the book, especially near the end. When Amory revisits Princeton after the war, full of early disillusion, Fitzgerald gives us this stunning passage.

n  Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light – and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights, destined finally to go out into the dirty grey turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all God’s dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…n

Fitzgerald's obvious lyrical gift is on display, but there’s also a knowledge of the currents and rhythms of life that, even at so young an age, he intuitively grasped.

In short: there’s real artistry.

I was a firm believer (based in conspiracy theories and tiktoks, so Idk what that says about me) that Fitzgerald had stolen the great gatsby from Zelda, but after reading this and its story Im no longer sure. It reads exactly like TGG and knowing that it is based on a sort of autobiography he wrote about himself in his school days and was rejected from publishing makes me question things quite a bit.
All in all I enjoyed this a lot. Reading about Amory (what I think is actually just Fitzgerald basing a character off of himself) and his narcissistic personality and his airs of grandeur was just really really funny and at time sad to me.
I didnt expect to like this this much, but Im very glad I decided at tome point to think myself an intellectual an purchase this book at the second hand book store.

DNF 20%, despite good narration I found the protagonist really uninteresting and didn’t catch a whiff of something compelling coming down the pipe. Life is too short.