Elizabeth's review
This Side Of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I liked Tender is the Night better too, but I do love the last page of This Side of Paradise---"we grew up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken..." or something like that...I'm quoting from memory. I know it sounds adolescent, but they are words that to me still ring true, ninety years +/- years later....
"There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in a riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth--yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But oh--Rosalind! Rosalind!..." (elipses part of text).
Yeah, wow, he's doing so much there. I can't believe you remember it! I wonder how long it took him to write it? The addition of the Rosalind part at the end, kind of making fun of himself, adds a whole new dimension--that it's really about love and lust, this longing and defeat; amazing how he pulls back like that and almost makes fun of that gorgeous lyrical passage. I guess he thought this was adolescent too. But it still rings real, even if it's over the top :)
Elizabeth's review
This Side Of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Elizabeth's review
rating:
Gatsby, it turns out, is the book that has made me the least of a Fitzgerald fan. This one is fabulous, weird, stream of consciousness, shifting voices and even genres [poetry/theater script:] modernist, not at all as expected given the vast number of years since its execution and that of his great crowning modernist masterpiece Tender Is the Night. In this one visavis Tender...., the subject matter is for my taste more banal, boy's school, boys being aristocrats, but like in Tender.... Fitzgerald really hits that World War I and post-World War I aristocratic ennui, and the bizarre and ghoulish disconnect between wartime and a society that seems oblivious to its horrors, people drinking, partying, getting grotesque sloppy wasted. One thing instructive, to me, in this book was how Fitzgerald modulates with much control between irony and immediacy. The protagonist, Amory, is something of an anti-hero, if indulged by the narrator. A close third person holds the reader at a distance. Weird...more
I liked Tender is the Night better too, but I do love the last page of This Side of Paradise---"we grew up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken..." or something like that...I'm quoting from memory. I know it sounds adolescent, but they are words that to me still ring true, ninety years +/- years later....
"There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in a riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth--yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But oh--Rosalind! Rosalind!..." (elipses part of text).
Yeah, wow, he's doing so much there. I can't believe you remember it! I wonder how long it took him to write it? The addition of the Rosalind part at the end, kind of making fun of himself, adds a whole new dimension--that it's really about love and lust, this longing and defeat; amazing how he pulls back like that and almost makes fun of that gorgeous lyrical passage. I guess he thought this was adolescent too. But it still rings real, even if it's over the top :)