4.1
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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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ISBN-10
1909305170
ISBN-13
978-1909305175
Print length
264 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Storm Petrel Press
Publication date
September 26, 2022
Dimensions
5.08 x 0.66 x 7.8 inches
Item weight
12.5 ounces
ASIN :
B09C6HZCLX
File size :
842 KB
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as 'grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'.
In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work): six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.
Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a "generation" ... he might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'
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Customer reviews
4.1 out of 5
2,576 global ratings
Joshua S. Infiesto
5
Easily one of the best books I've ever read.
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2012
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I really like Fitzgerald, so my review may be a little biased. This is a hauntingly beautiful story about how relationships can change people, for better or worse. Fitzgerald, as always, writes with breathtaking lyricism. If you've read Gatsby, and you liked the writing, you'll probably like Tender is the night. It's darker and more mature. When I read this book, I'd find myself re-reading passages just to wallow in the luxuriant beauty of Fitzgerald's prose.
On the other hand, the novel isn't as facile as some of Fitzgerald's other works. It drags in places, and the lyricism can sometimes distract from plot and character development. It's certainly less "perfect" than Gatsby. I think it's more human. You may get bored from time to time, but I think the book is worth the occasional slow patch. I certainly don't regret reading it.
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6 people found this helpful
Philip L. Tudor
5
Putting together fragments of the lives of those he knows, and himself, plus more, F. Scott Fitzgerald creates a masterpiece.
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2014
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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.
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14 people found this helpful
Peter John
5
Heart wrenching
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2022
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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
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3 people found this helpful
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