|
| Tender Is the Night | 
| Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $1.22
You Save: $13.78 (92%)
New (61) Collectible (4) from $4.25
Avg. Customer Rating:  135 reviews
Sales Rank: 59798
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 068480154X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780684801544
ASIN: 068480154X
Publication Date: July 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: ** Possible marking on cover. 100% Satisfaction guaranteed on all purchases. Delivery is 7-14 days for standard mail. **
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Fitzgerald's weakest novel, but a good read.... July 7, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Through the narrative, it's clear that Fitzgerald cannot choose which character to develop, and in the end, none is explored satisfactorily. As a panorama of failed marriage, "Tender" lacks the strength of "The Beautiful and Damned", which I consider to be similar and superior, though less popular.
But still, F. Scott Fitzgerald is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the writing is wondrous, but this is not his quintessential book.
If the absurdist movement is regaining steam in American culture, this explains the resurgence of popularity in this novel, which though strong in the first third, turns out as an unsatisfying mess.
 Fitzgerald's most personal novel June 21, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
In a Swiss sanatorium above lake Zürich, Dr Richard (Dick) Diver meets a fascinating young patient, Nicole Warren. Nicole suffers from Divided Personality at its acute down-hill phase which translates in her fear of men because she was the victim of incest after her mother's death.
Nicole's state improves after some time at the clinic and Richard marries her. They move to the French Riviera where they live in the glamour provided by Nicole's family money but soon their luck runs out.
This novel is Fitzgerald's most personal one if one considers that his own wife Zelda became increasingly troubled with mental illness in the 1930s and so the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole shows the pain that the author went through himself. It is the moving account of the collapse of a marriage and an attempt to diagnose the sickness and destruction that money breeds. Dick's final loneliness in the novel reflects Fitzgerald's own dive into drink and despair.
 I love books and this one is just bad... April 22, 2007
2 out of 14 found this review helpful
Boring, outdated ex-patriate story of life in Paris between the wars, focusing on a young American actress, a psychologist Dr. Diver and his wife, an American baroness with issues. Lots of drinking and gossip.
Fitzgerald would give anything for a happy ending? April 16, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Why does Nicole and Dick's marriage disintigrate? The obvious answer is that Dick compromised his integrity marrying Nicole for her money and that Dick is an egomaniac, needing to be needed.
The deeper more true answer is that Nicole and Dick didn't have a partnership. She was sick and couldn't give very much back to Dick--to the relationship. And it gets tiring or boring always doing the same things for the same person to save them from themselves over and over again. Co-dependent relationships don't work.
Although a lot of the discussions about mental illness are extremely dated, some of the descriptions are painfully accurate. I identified with Nicole's sister who could only stop worrying about Nicole if: 1) Nicole married a Doctor to take care of her, and 2) if Niole lived near a sanitarium.
This is what it is like to have a loved one who is mentally ill:
"It was necessary to treat her [Nicole] with active, affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brillance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through and over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it".
Too bad there are no organized ways of providing an organized front in our culture to help the mentally ill.
Perhaps Fitzgerald (FSF) would have swapped his well being for Zelda's--a prayer, "Lord, take my sanity but give Zelda back hers. Unlike Nicole, Zelda didn't get better.
I loved the description of the Rivera and Switzerland in the 1920s. I wish i could have been a part of it. The first part of the book is like watching the movie "To Catch a Thief" with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. You just love the ambience.
I liked this book better than _The Great Gatsby_ because I cared more about the characters and because it is autobiographical, and because I have had a loved one who is mentally ill.
The Madness Behind the Mask April 6, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
High flying, fast living F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) attained great commercial and critical fame early in life--and then began a rapid fall into a ferocious alcoholism. In 1925 THE GREAT GATSBY, now regarded as his masterpiece and often described as "the great American novel," was published to only mildly enthusiastic reviews and sold poorly; in order to fund the lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed, Fitzgerald set aside his next book length project and turned to short stories and the occasional bout of "writing for Hollywood."
Although Fitzgerald began to formulate ideas for TENDER IS THE NIGHT as early as 1925, the project was slow to take form and was not published until 1934--by which time it had become a reflection of Fitzgerald's stormy marriage to the equally high flying, fast living Zelda Sayre, who gradually sank into insanity and was permanently institutionalized by the early 1930s. Originally published in serial form in Scribner's Magazine, it received mixed reviews, and when it was published as a novel it did not prove the great commercial success Fitzgerald hoped. It was the last novel he completed before his 1940 death.
The story is set in Europe, where the Fitzgeralds themselves lived through much of the 1920s, and begins with Rosemary, a very young woman who has recently jolted to fame and fortune as an actress in silent film. Beautiful but in many respects innocent, Rosemary vacations on the Riviera--where she makes the acquaintance of Dick and Nicole Diver, an incredibly wealthy, exceptionally attractive couple who seem to be the height of all the modern era has to offer. Rosemary quickly subcums to Dick Diver's immeasurable charm and falls in love with him, but Nick is determinedly bound to Nicole, as much from responsibility as love. Nicole's apparent flawlessness is a facade. Dick is a psychiatrist; his wife, Nicole, is also his patient. She is insane.
Fitzgerald was often accused of writing about rich and pretty but trivial people. In one sense this is true, but in Fitzgerald's work the shiny surface is precisely that, a false front that the characters present to the world in order to maintain both their social standing and self-image. As the novel moves back and forward in time, we see how Dick has been "bought" by Nicole's family and how he is repeatedly torn between love for Nicole as a husband and care for her as a patient so that--even as Nicole begins a final recovery--he begins his own destruction, sucked dry by the endless personal and professional compromises required of him. Increasingly dark in tone, TENDER IS THE NIGHT is not so much disillusioning as it is ultimately, painfully nhilistic.
Fitzgerald seemed to regard TENDER IS THE NIGHT as both his most personal and his favorite work, and there are few who would not regard it as a masterpiece. Even so, it is very much a flawed masterpiece, occasionally problematic to a point at which it snaps the reader out of the very reality it attempts to create, most often due to Fitzgerald's own authorial self-indulgence. That said, the characters and their situations are not always as convincing as one could wish and the structure of the novel is occasionally muddy. And yet--
Even with these glaring issues running throughout the novel, TENDER IS THE NIGHT is the sort of book that you think you will not finish and then suddenly find yourself on the last page. Whereas THE GREAT GATSBY tended to focus on the mask, TENDER IS THE NIGHT focuses on the face beneath it, and the result is uniquely powerful. You care about the Divers and even though you sense their ultimate fate you, like they themselves, fight against it. It has moments of brilliance as powerful and often more so than any other novel of the first half of the 20th Century. Strongly recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
