My rating
3 stars
Blurb
Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year. "It's amazing how excellent much of it is," Ernest Hemingway said to Maxwell Perkins. "I will say now," John O'Hara wrote Fitzgerald, "Tender Is the Night is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side of Paradise." And Archibald MacLeish exclaimed: "Great God, Scott...You are a fine writer. Believe it -- not me." Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character -- lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative -- Tender Is the Night, Mabel Dodge Luhan remarked, raised F. Scott Fitzgerald to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."My thought
A truly sad book. It has flaws, but it also has Fitzgerald's prose and that means it's as good in spots as anything anyone has done or could done
The novel tells the story of the Nicole and Dick Diver, a wealthy, American couple living in Europe in the early 20th century. As the story opens they are introduced to a young movie actress, Rosemary, who is infatuated with Dick and with the lifestyle the Divers and their friends enjoy. Slowly Rosemary, and the reader, watches the Divers’ marriage disintegrate, and Dick, in particular, descend into alcoholic despair.
Fitzgerald ingenously creates the perfect tone for his jazz age novel by creating movement in almost everything in the novel. The music is always changing, the scenes are always about moving from one point to another. Everything, including Dick Diver's life, is in constant motion.
There were a lot of things I liked about this book. The writing was gorgeous. The story was not bad. The character development was quite good. Overall I was more impressed than with Great Gatsby
Quotes
“The moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment, was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there.”
Rosemary“He tried breaking into other dialogues, but it was like continually shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been withdrawn.”
Abe McKisco“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a very long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him—whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl."
“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do—they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
“New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.”
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.
“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing,” he said. “Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”
“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”
