the title was very good and then it all kinda went downhill from there

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.

My paperback copy has post it notes stuck on pages where I loved a quote, an idea, a tie in to something else, and just a part of the story I enjoyed. Fitzgerald crafts a sentence that just explodes with emotion and thought. I enjoyed this one immensely. So much that I splurged on a copy of Matthew Bruccoli's work on the composition of this book- which is amazing judging from my brief sifting through it.

I plan to update this review a bit more once I learn more on this book's background.

I mean…it begins badly, tails off a bit in the middle, and the less said about the ending the better.

Occasionally, there are books that leave you at a loss as to how to dismiss them. Reading this I kept thinking of a line from Stoppard's The Real Thing: ‘There’s something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don’t know how to deal with you.’ Tender is the Night is not stupid, but it is, if you like, triviality made coherent. The story of a wealthy married couple going through a mid-life crisis, it's such a nothingy narrative couched in formally perfect prose that attacking it feels like swinging at a ghost – the disparity between form and content is dizzying. It's like watching Stephen Hawking spend half an hour punching something into his speech computer, only to hear it reel off a haiku about Joey Essex.

Where to start. Construction-wise, it's a complete mess; Fitzgerald realised this, and was still rearranging chapters until he died, hoping for a rehabilitation which the novel has eventually found (it was panned on release). In its original, and most commonly printed, form, the first hundred and twenty pages introduce a baffling profusion of characters with no discernible story, at which point the narrative drops back a few years to set up the main couple of Dick and Nicole, a charmless pair of socialites based fairly closely on F. Scott and Zelda.

A chronological reordering might, perhaps, solve some of the problems, although personally I would advocate cutting the opening section altogether, dropping the middle bit, and then drastically abridging the end section, so that you're left with a slim pamphlet consisting of a nice speech about the First World War, some good descriptions of Zurich, an extramarital fumble in a French hotel room, and then a speedy conclusion. Job done.

Instead it just goes on and on, retailing anecdotes about peripheral characters who seem to spend the whole book going through a series of boring encounters designed only to highlight the period's casual racism, homophobia and misogyny. It's difficult to overstress how little I cared about anyone in here. The settings – Nice, Rome, Lausanne – should provide colour, but in fact they have few distinguishing features, becoming interchangeable stops on a general American-eye view of Yurp. In Gatsby I had loved Fitzgerald's nocturnal flights of melancholy prose; here, instead, he seems to be in a sort of Hemingway mode, all flat cynicism and brittle dialogue and bitter comments about ‘the opportunistic memory of women’.

Most of all, perhaps, I hated the equation drawn between professional productivity and personal happiness. The long, drawn-out decline and fall which comprises the latter half of the novel tries to show that Dick is a failure as a man because he never completed his book and because he develops a greater affection for his children. Don't get me wrong, Dick is – well – he's a dick, isn't he – but all the same, I thought it seemed a bit unfair to argue that because he chooses not to fight to keep his adulterous wife, and instead ends up practising medicine in a tiny town in New York state, that he's somehow therefore an archetypal symbol of a wasted life.

There is something deeply ambivalent about Fitzgerald's appraisal of the dissipation, drunkenness and fatuous frivolity of a world to which he himself belonged. Surely we can only condemn the characters for their snobbery, their thoughtlessness, their attitude that money should get them out of the kind of difficulty that they have brought upon themselves through ignorance, self-deception or sheer bloody-mindedness? And yet at the same time we can feel sympathy for fragile Nicole, for Dick's descent into oblivion, for Rosemary's innocence. These are the characters that Fitzgerald treats with sympathy and kindness, whereas the McKiscos, whose only crime seems to be that they are not 'well-bred', are cruelly done by:

n  Dick laid aside his reading and, after the few minutes that it took to realize the change in McKisco, the disappearance of the man’s annoying sense of inferiority, found himself pleased to talk to him. McKisco was “well-informed” on a range of subjects wider than Goethe’s — it was interesting to listen to the innumerable facile combinations that he referred to as his opinions. They struck up an acquaintance, and Dick had several meals with them. The McKiscos had been invited to sit at the captain’s table but with nascent snobbery they told Dick that they “couldn’t stand that bunch.”

Violet was very grand now, decked out by the grand couturières, charmed about the little discoveries that well-bred girls make in their teens. She could, indeed, have learned them from her mother in Boise but her soul was born dismally in the small movie houses of Idaho, and she had had no time for her mother. Now she “belonged”— together with several million other people — and she was happy, though her husband still shushed her when she grew violently naïve.n

Does that reveal a deep-seated sense of superiority in the narrator, or is he making fun of the McKiscos' ambition, of their wish to belong to this tawdry world of high society? Does Dick marry Nicole for her money or for love? Is Dick brilliant or merely self-aggrandizing? There were so many questions left open in my mind, but then that is the mark of a classic, one that is not closed off, reduced to only one obvious interpretation, but a work that opens up possibilities in the imagination.

"Tender is the Night" is the story of Dick Diver, a charming young psychiatrist, whose life spiraled downhill due to alcoholism and the pressures of marriage to mentally ill Nicole Warren. He is trying to be a psychiatrist, a husband, and even a father figure to Nicole. The young Dick Diver is based a bit on the author's friend, Gerald Murphy. As the novel progresses, the characters of Dick and Nicole increasingly resemble Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

I had mixed feelings reading the story. On one hand, Fitzgerald has written many beautiful and insightful scenes in the book. He's included interesting themes of mental health treatment, sexual abuse, a difficult marriage, infidelity, and alcoholism. The novel is set in wonderful settings--the French Riviera, Paris, and Italy. The characters are partly based on the rich, famous, and artistic people the Fitzgeralds socialized with in the 1920s. But the story contains many incidents that never go anywhere. The first part of the book, involving the young starlet Rosemary meeting the married Dick Diver, is overly long and slow.

I've done some reading in the past about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald so it was heartbreaking reading about the decline of Dick Diver. "Tender in the Night" is a flawed book, but a beautifully tragic story. 3.5 to 4 stars.

Apparently, after Fitzgerald finally finished writing this book – which he considered to be his masterpiece – he was disappointed that it wasn’t universally recognised as the great American novel. Now, I’m not really an expert on great American novels, but there are perhaps one or two things about this book that might have alerted him to the fact that this one might not end up on the top of that particular list.

For example, I’m not sure that a novel set almost entirely in France and Italy (besides for a very short jaunt across the Atlantic for 15 minutes about halfway through to kill off a father) is likely to qualify in the Great American novel stakes.

I also think that you will probably struggle if incest is one of your major themes. And it is a theme that is very confronting – and I suspect not just to me, a father with two daughters – but would be confronting to anyone reading this book. Not just for the deed itself, the incest taboo is one of our strongest taboos, right up there with not eating excrement, but for how he plays with this throughout the book.

And I mean he does play with it. The young woman that comes into Dick Divers’ life to send shockwaves through his marriage and life has just starred in a film called ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and we are reminded of this fact at least a dozen times before and after the revelation in Book Two that makes you flick back over what has happened in the book up until that point and re-evaluate everything you thought you knew and understood. And all of the incidental imagery suddenly has a tackiness and causes more disgust than I thought possible up until that revelation. Generally in this book when people are destined to have sex with each other there are allusions to how young and childlike they are. Although it is never actually stated in quite these terms in the book, it is clear that one of the attractions of Dick to Nicole is how young and child like she is when they meet. And he falls out of love for her when he stops feeling he can father her.

This is a book about love, this is a book about trust and this is a book about consequences. There are a series of affairs in this book and each is entered into as if there would be no consequences – but life simply isn’t like that, life does have consequences and some things shouldn’t be played with. In this book sex is one of the things you shouldn’t play with, sex is something that messes with your mind and is never ‘casual’.

If I had more time and was studying this novel to really understand it then the first thing I would do would be to work out how, when and why the point of view changes throughout the novel. Because the point of view does change constantly throughout this book and we are always seeing the action through the eyes of one of the characters, but not always through the eyes of the same one nor always through the eyes of the character we might expect to see the action via. For example, much of what happens in Italy is seen through the eyes of Baby.

If you have been through a divorce this book will probably have quite a bit of salt for all those scars you might have thought had healed over nicely.

Alcohol plays a very large part in this book too – and in ways that quite neatly sum up all of my fears about drink.

So, this is a book that is raw and confronting and I found painfully sad. It is a book that says things about the human condition that are jet-black. It is not a book that I think one can read and then shrug off – I think this book will live with me for months to come.

For love is a delicate, soft-winged thing…

All the same, I think that as far as American novels are concerned (particularly South American novels) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was much more American than this one, but then, few books would compare with that one.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

This novel pretty much contains all the vices or sins of humanity or at least a large number of the major ones: infidelity, vanity, alcoholism, pleasure-seeking, love of money, greed, incest, child abuse. And the tragic results of lives spent in such a way is demonstrated by the plethora or characters we meet in this novel. Mental illness, destruction of marriages, extra-marital love affairs, poor decisions, depression, purposelessness and ultimately the decline and disillusionment of individuals. Sounds like a real fun party doesn’t it? Well, it started out well but then just went down for me just like our protagonist.

This is the story of an American psychiatrist, Dick Diver whose captivating and charming personality allured the many friends and socialites to his villa on the French Riviera for parties and social events. He and his wife, Nicole live an extravagant life of decadence and their vibrance is envious to one young Hollywood starlet named Rosemary who threatens to disrupt the happy couple. But things aren’t always what they seem on the outside. The Diver’s marriage is crumbling like Nicole’s mental health since her childhood and Dick struggles with his own demons - desiring women, drinking, and insecurities which send him into a downward spiral. Sadly we witness Dick take himself down this path of no return.

”Think how you love me,” she whispered, “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

Sadly this story reflects much of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s own troubles in their marriage as well as their individual struggles. Zelda’s mental instabilities left her institutionalized and she died tragically in a fire that burned down the mental hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scott himself suffered from depression and alcoholism.

But the novel itself seemed disjointed to me. It is written in 3 parts each very different and seeming to be beginnings to separate stories or novellas. They did not gel well together for me. However, there are many times throughout when I was captivated by Fitzgerald’s prose but then on the next page left wondering what just happened. There isn’t really much to like in any of the characters or to even sympathize with. I just wanted to get to the end and be out of this exhausting lifestyle and move on.


”Oh, we’re such actors—you and I.”

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still.

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.

Μέσα στο πολυσέλιδο αυτό βιβλίο παρακολουθούμε την άνοδο και την πτώση ενός ιδιόμορφου ζευγαριού. Του γιατρού Ντικ Ντάιβερ και της γυναίκας του Νικόλ. Ο Φιτζέραλντ ουσιαστικά τροποποιεί λογοτεχνικά την ζωή του και την θυελλώδη σχέση του με την γυναίκα του Ζέλντα.
Το βιβλίο έχει ενδιαφέρουσες στιγμές, όμως όπως και στο "Μεγάλο Γκάτσμπυ" έτσι και σε αυτό το έργο ο τρόπος γραφής του Φιτζέραλντ μου φάνηκε κάπως παλιός, λίγο βαρετός και σε πολλές στιγμές παρωχημένος. Δεν νομίζω πλέον πως μου ταιριάζει ο συγκεκριμένος συγγραφέας ενώ σε γενικές γραμμές η θεματολογία του δεν με ελκύει. Ίσως σε μια άλλη εποχή, ίσως...
Εντούτοις δεν μπορώ να μην αναγνωρίσω την εξαιρετική σκιαγράφηση των χαρακτήρων του και τις όμορφες περιγραφές των τοπίων και ��διαίτερα της Γαλλικής Ριβιέρας. Στοιχεία όμως που δεν ήταν αρκετά για να με "δέσουν" με τους χαρακτήρες και να με ενθουσιάσουν σαν αναγνώστη...
3/5

ΥΓ: δεν είμαι σίγουρος αν η μετάφραση ήταν καλή, αλλά θα ανατρέξω στο πρωτότυπο για να τσεκάρω. Κάτι δεν πήγαινε καλά όμως

World War I sucked. I know this, because all wars have sucked.

The Spanish flu sucked. I know this, because all flus have sucked.

When the times suck, people tend to suck, too.

When people suck, they often do foolish things. They drink too much alcohol, have extramarital affairs, speak unkindly of others, treat people they perceive as inferior to them as objects, or garbage.

The people who populate this novel are perfect examples of what happens when people suck. Worse still, when they suck and they are at the top tier of humanity (whether they got there through birth, hard work or luck), they live fast lives, tell fast stories and tell faster lies. Their exteriors take priority over their interiors and they become, simply, casings.

This all could be a rich, juicy minefield for storytelling, but, sadly, it wasn't in this novel. Or, it wasn't for me, despite the great love I have always had for F. Scott's work.

Mr. Fitzgerald wrote, of this novel, in May 1926: “My book is wonderful. I don't expect to be interrupted again. I expect to reach New York about December 10th with the manuscript under my arm. . .”

It's interesting, to me, that he was so pleased with it. It is pleasing, in ways, with fabulous sentences like this one: The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

But, this novel felt to me a lot like his characters. . . like a casing. Everyone fell flat here, they were one-dimensional. It's not even a case of my liking them or disliking them. What's important is that they're not formed or developed. Yes, they're vacuous and annoying, but if they felt real to me, I would have enjoyed them.

The plot's a hot mess, too. I frequently had no idea what was going on, but instead of rereading the confusing paragraphs, I'd just plod on, hoping they'd all disappear and I'd finally see the end of the book.

And: Sigh. Don't get me started on the deep, intrinsic feel to yet another novel published by a man in the 1930s. Women are useless in this novel, unless they're gorgeous and willing to have sex; people of color are as insubstantial as discarded corsages, after the party.

In case it's unclear, I'm not writing this review with any pleasure this morning. This website, Goodreads, is currently treating its users, the readers and writers that have made this site WHAT IT IS, as discarded corsages, as well, and another literary hero of mine, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has made my stomach turn with his visceral racism and misogyny.

We need a hero, and quick, people. You won't find any in this novel.

Losing is a part of being a human, and sometimes the more you lose, the more vulnerable and tender you are
a kind of social and psychological story follows the life of Dick Diver and the nature of his marital relationship over years
his life gradually was torn apart, he was lost between a trivial life, the psychological problems of his wife, faded career and an affair with a young actress
finding himself adrift in a world that is entirely purposeless
bitter but beautiful written novel, Fitzgerald writes cleverly about the glamorous entertaining life of rich people at the french riviera

apparently the novel reflects Fitzgerald's own experiences and struggles with alcoholism and being with a partner suffering from mental illness