I started this read with this anthology n  n but had to switch to an ebook version when the typos became too much.

I read The Great Gatsby for school many years ago, but I didn't really appreciate it until I read it as an adult & it is now one of my favourite classics. I know I tried to read at least one other Fitzgerald novel (it could even have been this one!) but couldn't get into it.

If this is the one I attempted earlier, I am very glad to have revisited it.

I do wonder how Zelda would have felt about their life together being so ruthlessly mined. But Zelda also used their life for her only novel Save Me the Waltz (which I am now on the hunt for) It sounds like Fitzgerald was not impressed & felt only he had the right to use their material!

This book is beautifully written, but is much like a collection of red flags with the dubious ethics of psychiatrist Dick Driver marrying his very young patient Nicole & becoming infatuated with a young actress Rosemary. This mirrored real life as Fitzgerald did eventually have an affair with actress Lois Moran (Rosemary is based on Lois's character);

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In real life the age difference was even greater - they met when she was seventeen & he was a married man of 31.

There are also many instances of casual racism & discrimination, which I look on as why we shouldn't be nostalgic for 'The Good Old Days'. they weren't good old days for anyone who wasn't white. Not to mention the sexism...

'That's just it,' complained Baby stubbornly. 'Nicole's rich.'
'Just how much money has she got?' he asked.
She started; and with a silent laugh he continued, 'You see how silly this is? I'd rather talk to some man in your family-'

Even though Baby seems the most capable person in the book - although that isn't saying much. Certainly if you need your main characters to be likeable this may not be the book for you. & some actions that Dick gets away with seem improbable almost to the point of being farcical.

The real life tragedy of the Fitzgerald's & their squandering of their respective gifts in a large part due to alcoholism is hard to think about. But this is still a magnificent book.

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“… Io volerò a te… sulle ali invisibili della poesia… Tenera è la notte / e felicemente la Luna Regina è sul suo trono… ma qui non c’è luce…”
(Ode all’usignolo” di John Keats)

All'inizio non ti raccapezzi. Tutto appare piatto, algido, distante nel suo splendore patinato. Ti ritrovi in Costa Azzurra, un albergo con la facciata rosa e una frivola Rosemary. Tanti personaggi futili, qualche divagazione di troppo, ma questa è vita, la senti vibrare e ne sei travolto. Un climax incredibile e poi la scena si ribalta, la lettura diventa introspettiva e certe figure si rivelano; la struttura si compie nella sua complessa perfezione, viaggiando avanti ed indietro nel tempo. Nella seconda parte del romanzo capisci l'amore, la passione, la fine di un sogno che credevi eterno.

"Era una limpida notte buia appesa come in un canestro ad un unica stella smorta".

Lo definirei quasi un "romanzo-testamento", sia per la parabola artistica che per quella umana dell'autore, ormai in preda all'alcolismo, sia per il senso tragico della fine di un'epoca, gli Anni Ruggenti. Le azioni e i pensieri dei personaggi sembrano essere la trasposizione dei desideri e delle paure inconfessabili dell’autore che rivela, in una prosa complessa e più volte rivisitata (ha impiegato 9 anni per completare il romanzo), un forte senso di oppressione ed inadeguatezza di fronte alla malattia e alla vita stessa. Un'opera solo apparentemente leggera, in realtà cupa e disperata.

"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"

If I had to rate Fitzgerald’s novels (1 being the most loved):
1.tThe Great Gatsby
2.tThe Last Tycoon
3.tThe Beautiful and Damned
4.tThis Side of Paradise
5.tTender Is the Night

Fitzgerald admitted that he was experimenting with a couple of narrative techniques in Tender Is the Night. And he didn’t pull off either one.

The first experimental technique utilized is the flashback—Fitzgerald is telling the story out of order. But – good grief—this flashback is the entire Book One, a third of the novel! In addition, most readers are at least slightly biased toward the character that they are first introduced.

The second experimental technique is the fade-out ending, which is another term for a boring, lackluster, unmemorable ending.

These techniques didn’t come together, and the pacing is incredibly uneven. There is no suspense; the book is boring, and then the ending is breathtakingly abrupt.

Now, Fitzgerald’s problem is that he forgot his own writing philosophy. He wanted to focus on how the reader felt. “I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring.” The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 362

Although Rebecca by du Maurier was published in 1938, after Tender Is the Night, that is the tone I believe Fitzgerald was trying to achieve but he failed epically.

None of the characters are likeable and this book was boring until the end, which seemed to come out of nowhere and landed like an unexpected punch (and not in a good way).

Bits of stardust can be found sprinkled throughout, but it wasn’t enough to redeem this novel (Sorry, Fitzgerald—you know I still love you….muah!)

And with that, I will remind those who read the book of this Bible passage, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $60.18 for a First Edition Library copy on Mercari
Audiobook – Audible – 1 credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or rough $9.56 per credit)

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Just finished Tender Is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald having previously read it about 15 years ago.

Almost as good as The Great Gatsby, but not quite.

Yet again I got very caught up in the mood of the book and particularly enjoyed the account of early tourism on the French Riviera in the late 1920s with the beautiful and hedonistic Divers.

From there it's a semi-autobiographical tale of deterioration, unfulfilled potential, disappointment, and disillusionment - all beautifully written, painfully so.

It is suffused with the glamour of Fitzgerald's own life, in particular his marriage to the lovely but unbalanced Zelda, a marriage which ultimately failed. This contributed to Fitzgerald's sense that, like Dick Diver, he was a ruined and unrealised individual.

A splendid read.

4/5


More about Tender Is the Night....

Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans to visit. Among the most fashionable are psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, who hold court at their villa. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that hold them together. As Dick draws closer to Rosemary, he fractures the delicate structure of his marriage and sets both Nicole and himself on to a dangerous path where only the strongest can survive. In this exquisite, lyrical novel, Fitzgerald has poured much of the essence of his own life; he has also depicted the age of materialism, shattered idealism and broken dreams.

I have always loved this early section...

They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose — Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them — not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the ONLY man with repose —”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“— but he may be the only sober man with repose.”

A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched — whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.

A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point — that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers — made a bet with Dick of five dollars.

His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again — the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair .

With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.

“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”

In A Moveable Feast , Hemingway speaks extensively about Scott Fitzgerald and his relationship with Zelda. The portrait of both is far from favourable, almost caricatural, with a Scott looking like a boy but “with a mouth like a girl’s” and behaving equally immaturely, with episodes of hypochondria, drunkenness and naïveté. On the other hand, Zelda behaves like a shrew, despising her husband as a man, resenting his talent and pushing him to drink even more because her jealousy of his writing.

But Hemingway’s conclusion, that “scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane” is not necessarily true. In fact, many a reader thinks that his last novel, Tender Is the Night, is even better than The Great Gatsby (although not me, I have to confess, for I am forever mesmerized by the latter).

It seems that the plot of Tender Is the Night, inspired by his own tragic marriage, was already in the author’s mind during those crazy years in Paris. In the same book I mentioned before, Hemingway recalls the first time Scott Fitzgerald told him the story of his marriage, and even though later he would be given other versions of the same story, “as though trying them for use in a novel”, he always felt that the first one was the truest and the saddest:

“and he started to tell me the outline of his life with zelda. he told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at st-raphael about a year ago.”

(N.B. the absence of caps is Hemingway’s doing not mine

This is a hard but necessary book to read. It should be the type of plot we're attracted to, because it's a dissolution story, not unlike LOST WEEKEND or LEAVING LAS VEGAS, to name but two examples of the genre. And yet many friends I share this with just can't get into it. Part of the blame lies with the style: it's just so damned intricate and thick, it tends to scare away those who don't want to be ravished by style. As someone who does, I can get lost in this book any day of the week. I reread this for work probably once a year, and I'm always amazed at how fresh it seems to me---mainly because I'm always discovering a line or phrase that I'd passed over.

Other reasons to like TITN: It's Fitzgerald's most experimental, with just about every modernist trick in the book. It has two fantastic heroines that come to life when they emerge from Dick Diver's point of view: Nicole and Rosemary. There are glamorous excursions from Nice to Paris and Rome. It has that overwhelming sense of abstraction---it feels like you're reading history, a socialist critique of excess capitalism (check out the chapter on Nicole's shopping spree), a look into the prurience and spectatorship of early filmmaking, a dressing down of romanticism, and a love story about the impossibility of love.

Oh, and its so achingly, gloriously sad---I think that's the main reason I consider it a classic.

n  "The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild...."n
"Ode to a Nightingale," Keats

Dick Diver, a psychiatrist and writer in his late 30s with loads of potential, travels the fashionable places in France and Italy with his wife Nicole and a group of several other expat Americans.

The novel's title was taken from a line in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," which reflects on the fleetingness of pleasure and the certainty of death. The partly autobiographical novel was Fitzgerald's favorite and revolves around Diver's descent into full-blown alcoholism and a complete moral collapse after developing Florence Nightingale syndrome for, and marrying Nicole, his lovely and emotionally unbalanced patient. He further loses his way after an 18-year-old actress develops a crush on Dick. He falls for the enticement of youth and beauty, which is partly to blame for his wife beginning an affair with a young soldier. After the young actress jilts him and he's cuckolded by his wife, he begins drinking more heavily which only exacerbates his problems and further dooms his marriage and career.

Sorry, but I found this too much of a diver downer, a cautionary tale, for me to have enjoyed it or to give it a sincere recommendation.

Such a beautiful title.

The only other book from Fitzgerald I read is, of course, The Great Gatsby, which didn't impress me. So only naturally, I'm reluctant to read any other book by The Lost Generation, or at least, any by Fitzgerald. I know it's ridiculously assuming of me, but first impression makes all the differences and I'm oh so prejudiced.

Ah, but the title is so, so beautiful. So I thought, why not giving it a go? It's only a fairly thin book anyway. At least it won't take long.

Another mistake, it turned out. I think I won't ever read anything else by Mr. Fitzgerald. Yeah, sure, it is beautiful and everything, but I couldn't see the purpose of the whole thing: pointless parties, nonsense sentiments, gossips, judging other people to show off their classiness, verbiage… all those trivias serve what? At 30% I still had no idea what was happening. Ah, maybe that's the point: The Lost Generation is, using Sanderson's words, like a broken sword. It's very sharp, but lacking a point. Anyway, I refuse to like a discursive story. Every character laughed this moment and cried the next, without any excuse other than an inexplicable change of heart. I'd just call it schizophrenia.

The story was bad enough, and then I just couldn't stand the style. Well I suppose that's what the whole Jazz Age fuss was about. Everything was supposed to be oh-so-French I could die on the spot. Live in the present, drink as if there's no tomorrow, party hard, be elegant and fashionable, everybody has swag!, things like that. I was so annoyed.

Oh, such a beautiful title...

A tragedy backlit by beauty... Firzgerald writes of longing in a way that is heartbreaking.

It is the French Rivierain the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Divers' calculated perfection begins to crack and dark truths emerge.

This story has reflected the very personal marriage problems and affairs that occured in Fitzgeralds lives. My only critic is the moral side of the story. A careless selfish young girl corrupting a couple's life is a depressing story.

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.

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

Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel "Tender is the Night" is a story of part of America's "Lost Generation" in the period following WW I. Most of the story is set on the French Riviera in the 1920s with a large cast of wealthy, dissipated and idle Americans with little to do with themselves. The book tells of the fall of Dick Diver, a promising and idealistic young American psychiatrist. As an intern in Zurich, Dick had married a beautiful wealthy young American woman, Nichole Warren, who had been his patient. Nichole had severe and lasting psychiatric issues resulting from sexual abuse by her father. While on the Riviera, several years into the marriage, Dick is attracted to a callow 18-year old American movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt. Although he resists Rosemary's advances at the time, her memory stays with him. She and Dick have a brief affair a few years later. Dick ultimately sees her as shallow. By that time, his life has dissipated through drink, idleness, problems with Nichole, and the corrupting effect of Nichole's money. Nichole leaves Dick, and he returns to the States for a lonely, wasted life. It is all very sad.

The story is haunting, effectively organized, and well told. The opening scenes take place on the French Riviera with Dick seemingly at the height of his powers as a socialite and budding medical writer. After an extended opening, the story doubles back to Dick's life in Zurich and his fateful courtship of Nichole. We then witness Dick Diver's inexorable deterioration, alcoholism, and degeneracy, and the break-up of his marriage. The writing is eloquent and spare, with good characterizations of mostly unappealing people and pictures of places. Fitzgerald shows the rootlessness of a class of Americans after the Great War and the corrupting effects of money and idleness. Dick Diver's story, I thought, was sad and sentimental rather than tragic. There is little of the hero about him.

"Tender is the Night" is the story of wandering lives, lost innocence, and the waste of human potential. In some ways, the book reminded me of the writings of the Beats, following WW II. It is a 20th Century American book that rewards knowing.

Robin Friedman