Tender is the Night
Books | Fiction / Classics
3.7
(544)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture. Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate. F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."
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Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pages
368
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Published Date
2003-05-27
ISBN
0743247418 9780743247412
Ratings
Google: 3
Community ReviewsSee all
""The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partition of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes ... he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in," (Fitzgerald, 172).
Wow. I had this book recommended to me by a friend in the context of a debate we were having. As is the age-old conflict, I was arguing that Hemingway was the greatest American novelist, and he was arguing that it was Fitzgerald. Both of us had read short stories by both men, and both of us had read one or two of their most beloved novels, but both of us had missed important staples. He hadn't yet read The Sun Also Rises, my favourite novel, and I hadn't read Tender is the Night. So, I started this book with high hopes, but doubtful that Fitzgerald would match the prowess of my favourite author.
I was wrong. While I believe that Hemingway still takes the cake, Tender is the Night has catapulted Fitzgerald into my top few favourites, and this work, in particular, is among the greatest novels I've ever read. In fact, I found that this book is the closest thing to a Sun Also Rises short of maybe one or two other Hemingway works (although I'd say it surpasses a few of those as well). In my opinion, Tender is the Night is better than The Great Gatsby, provided you are willing to put in the extra couple-hundred pages of work. Book 1 instantly engaged me, Book 2 challenged that engagement, and Book 3 made me frantic to finish, but deeply saddened me when I reached the end of my journey.
Hemingway may be my desert-island reading pick, but Fitzgerald is who I wish most to emulate in my own writing.
The style is beautifully lyrical and the plot is hauntingly tragic, all of which come together in a poignant snapshot of human feeling that would be a travesty to miss."
"(4.5)"
L L
Laura Lauder
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