Tender is the Night: Tender Is the Night - Exploring the Themes of Tenderness and Relationships in Tender Is the Night: Tender Is the Night Popular novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald Kindle Edition

Tender is the Night was very interesting to me because I read it long after I read a biography of the writer. The book was written after Fitzgerald had been on a long dry spell and desperately needed money both to keep up his lifestyle and primarily to pay for incredibly expensive ongoing mental health hospitalization for his wife Zelda in Switzerland and the US. Fitzgerald takes a mix and match of his own life and those of others he met during the hey-day of American writers in Paris and Europe in the 1920's. Primarily, he uses a rich couple who coddled geniuses, Sarah and Gerald Murphy, as part models for the main couple of his book, Dick and Nicole Diver. While both of the Murphys were rich and started inviting the highly talented to their home by an initially almost private beach, Fitzgerald places the Divers in a close match to the Murphy's home on the French Riviera, has Dick raking the sand like Gerald Murphy did to make it habitable for sunbathing, and initially shows them as taste makers for the Lost Generation. However, Fitzgerald invents many parts of the Divers, such as one party to the relationship only being wealthy, while the other is a psychiatrist, and has the Divers travelling in a style much like the Fitzgeralds did, as they moved from one expensive hotel and rented apartment or home to another.Due to Fitzgerald's own wife's quite serious mental illness, which to me made her as well as Nicole Diver, upon whom her madness is modelled, quite egocentric. Fitzgerald clearly shows the burden of being married to a seriously ill person before medication entered the picture in psychiatry. Everything revolves around the mentally ill person's feelings and weaknesses, with the sane spouse having to always be the strong one with no one to turn to for his own insecurities, such as we all have. The book shows how Dick struggles with this, and how it eventually destroys him. In essence, while the wife is expected to have the destroyed life, much like Zelda Fitzgerald had; in this case the wife comes out on top and essentially betrays the man who has protected her for so many years and brought her to full sanity.Fitzgerald was extremely devoted to his wife, and devoted to her care (especially making sure it was paid for). as he drank himself into a more or less constant stupor as a process. I think this book was an outlet for him to tell what that felt like, as Zelda was talentless bur relentlessly jealous of her husband's talents. In fact, Zelda seemed to me to be much more dislikable than Nicole Diver in the book.The book, which has been hashed over for decades as a major classic, is still well worth reading. Fitzgerald's writing is downright lyrical in its beauty and the narration keeps you turning the pages, even though the book is in no way a thriller or mystery. I did not feel gulty giving a few spoilers in this review because I am probably the only serious reader who really did not know the plot of the book before I read it. It deserves its status as a worldwide classic, and is one of the best written books I have ever read.

Highly evocative of its time, people and places with some ravishing descriptive prose and sensitive character insights. On the negative side, a slightly unsatisfying structure with flashbacks, leaps in time and changing points-of-view. Elaborate use of metaphors occasionally becomes a distraction. Be prepared for the author’s uncritical treatment of racism, sexism, homophobia and class-bound prejudices.

This is the first F Scott Fitzgerald novel I’ve read. I possibly have read the Great Gatsby, many many years ago.It is romantic sad tugs at the heart and very eloquently written. I enjoyed his style more than Hemingway’s, not to say that I do not enjoy Hemingway’s writings. My French is very rusty and I wish the editors would have provided some translations. FSF’s writing is a far cry from most of the current novelists that I read and in reality I thoroughly enjoyed his deft use of the English language truly a thinking person’s novel. I will next read his first novel asap

Now, I have an admission to make. In my own fiction, I tend to get lost in my own little world, fall in love with my language and my parataxis, and subject my reader to little in-jokes that make me laugh. For example, in a recent work of mine, I included a little part about T. S. Eliot's Wasteland. I referenced, what I though to be heavy handedly, the "game of chess" section, and what I hoped to be more oblique, the "death by water" part. This was done because I was trying to get across the theme of decay. Ok, so it did not work. I can accept that fact. Maybe I have to be more aware of the audience, or something along those lines. The point here is that my own idiosyncrasies perhaps do not translate well. I have the same problem reading Fitzgerald that I suppose that people have when reading my own work. Alcoholics living out their own malaise in high society do not interest me. I cannot find the characters that Fitzgerald writes about compelling. I find myself disgusted at their self-indulgent and harmful acts. The knowledge that these characters come from real life in the circles that Fitzgerald lived in pushes me over the edge. He obviously had interest in these sorts of people. It cannot be denied that he the prime chronicler of the Jazz Age. Dick, Nicole and their lot are loathsome characters. I first read this book, two years or so ago, and I have to say that I have no desire to revisit it. There are other more pressing things on the schedule, like washing my hair. Fitzgerald got closer to a sympathetic character when he fleshed out Nick in The Great Gatsby. I think this is because he was portraying someone more like himself. Nick was more of an outsider looking in, or in his case, at the other end of the egg. Fitzgerald is able to create someone who you can sympathize with, because Nick somehow comes across as the most human of the characters that I can remember. Nick possesses a certain sense of longing to belong that seems to be indicative of Fitzgerald himself. He appears as an outsider in this expatriate community, or even the riche community of Gatsby. The question I have is, "Why is Fitzgerald so attracted to such loathsome characters?" He to seems entranced by broken people in circumstances that would seem to be the embodiment of success on some levels. These characters all have a façade that seems smooth and glassy, only you can see the imperfections the closer you get. Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, Abe, Jay, and Nick all have their failings in the realm of fiction. Fitzgerald has his own, and so does Zelda. I have no answers for my own question, and as a reader, I cannot get past this isolation that Fitzgerald uses by focusing on such unsympathetic characters. His writings have long been canonized, and are taught all over, but I have a distance with him that is greater than the one I feel when reading Hemingway.

From the title through to the conclusion this book is a masterpiece, which I’ve read several times, each time drawing something different from it. It is a well of rich, lyrical writing, a romance, a tragedy. It is life, it’s lessons hard learned, that Fitzgerald gives to us from his own tortures. If you’ve ever loved, given yourself completely to a person and seen that pass away from you as you always knew in some part of you that it would, you should read this book. That it’s setting is the Riviera gives wing to Fitzgerald’s gift for description, the tone, the texture. You can feel the warmth of the water, the sand, the sky the winds that sweep across the pines and yet always this stands as a counterpoint to the human beings, their loves, their tragedies.

I love it, it is a great edition!!

Though GREAT GATSBY is, indeed, "great".... far deeper, more nuanced & more heart-breakingly profound is the brilliant masterwork TENDER IS THE NIGHT. One of the masterpieces for the ages.....

Bonita edición de un gran clásico. Lo compré frente a otras ediciones pagando algo más por la editorial (penguin) y porque la encuadernación parecía buena pensando que la recibiría en cuadernillas en lugar de encolada (cosa que odio, porque al cabo del uso las hojas acaban sueltas) lamentablemente a pesar de ser una encuadernación muy hermosa es encolada. Habría preferido una edición de bolsillo en cuadernillas. Por lo demás....es Fitzgerald.

War ein Geschenk. Ist gut angekommen.

Another masterpiece by Fitzgerald. I give you one reason to read it, this quote "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." - as for the book itself, I suggest you to buy the Scribner edition always, as it was Fitzgerald's editor and it is the most genuine you can trust. This particular one is a beat cheap in terms of paper quality, I mean it's too thin, but I knew that as I bought the cheap version. As for the rest, all good. Ok size of the letters .