Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald

This novel is digested much better with a bit of background, and since I'm hosting the book club this week I kind of have to do it anyway.  Fitzgerald wrote 4 novels [and a ton of short stories] over the course of his life, with the fifth being unfinished and published posthumously.

This Side of Paradise, 1920
The Beautiful and the Damned, 1922
The Great Gatsby, 1925 [Read & loved]
Tender is the Night, 1934 [Read & digesting]
The Last Tycoon, 1941 [Read & loved]

I like to look at the years that the books were published, to see how much time it takes to complete a work and get a sense of what's happening in the time period.  The book was written pre-WWII, but right in the middle of the Great Depression which started in 1929 and ended in the mid thirties.

[SPOILERS BELOW]
The book chronicled the lives of Dick and Nicole Diver, who purchase a villa in the French Riviera some time after their marriage.  The couple meets a bunch of Americans on the beach, including Rosemary, an 18 year old actress.  Rosemary falls in love with Dick and Dick reciprocates this affection, despite being twice her age.  This occurs in the first part of three parts of the novel.  The second part deals with how Dick and Nicole met.  Nicole was abused by her father and was sent to a psychiatric ward.  She had met Dick on a previous occurrence and fell in love with him.  During her recovery, Dick and Nicole sent mail back and forth and eventually, after she made it out of the clinic, they wed.  There is a lot of talk in the novel about if Dick married for love or for science, but in my opinion, it was love and just devolved into science.  Dick is a psychiatrist, and after he gets married he goes through a stint of unemployment after a failed clinic in Switzerland.

The third part takes us back to the present.  Dick meets Rosemary again four years later and they consummate their love.  It happens to be a one time thing though, as Rosemary is not the same in Dick's head as in reality.  Meanwhile, Nicole chooses Tommy, a friend, as an outlet for her life... and they end up cheating in a motel.  Tommy falls in love with her (I'm not sure the feeling is reciprocal) and Nicole leaves Dick.  Dick wanders alone aimlessly, in and out of employment... battling his own personal demons.

[SPOILERS END]
Like a ton of good 'fiction', this novel is partly autobiographical.  Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1932.  Fitzgerald rented an estate ('la Paix') on the most expensive street in Paris.  He ran out of money several times, according to Wikipedia, and had to borrow money several times to complete the work.

The book deals with the concept of love.  There is a point in the novel (~pg 336) where it states that Dick just wanted to be loved.  I sympathize with this part of Diver's character... because I understand how it can jumble you up inside.  Nick tried to stick with his morals, but he fell out of love with Nicole and then resented the state of affairs that his life had amounted to.  Nicole was doomed from the start, and it's really a wonder she did as well as she did despite being abused as a child.  Rosemary never seemed to grow up.  The characters, as some critics state, are not well-described but I believe you get a sense for who they are... unless they're kind of frivolous characters which are alluded to briefly and can get jumbled up in your memory due to the lack of descriptions (if I recall correctly, this is the same as in "The Great Gatsby").

Fitzgerald uses some beautiful prose throughout the work, and despite not being memorable quotations, they are just beautifully crafted sentences.  In addition, there was some good humour used including a piece about a psychiatrist spending years of his life working on the complexities of something so minor (an armadillo's brain) just so he could do something 'different', only to find out that someone was doing the same thing in another part of the world.  The humour is sparse and subtle, but made me smile at times.

There were a couple of murders in this book, and they really weren't explained well and had virtually no ramifications on the book.  One broke up a possible episode between Dick and Rosemary, but the situation was never explained.  I'm sure that Fitzgerald had a reason for it, but it took away from the focus of the book, in my opinion.

On the whole, the book didn't impress me that much, but it's something that I think will benefit from a good book club discussion.  I've read some lovely reviews from Amazon that made me feel as if I should have fallen in love with the book, but I really just fell in love with the review.  On the whole, I enjoyed the story but didn't ever feel like I was really into it.  I wanted to be, but I felt that this Fitzgerald work was the least enjoyable and memorable of the three I have currently read.


Some Interesting Notes:
The novel is ranked 28th on the Modern Library's List of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. 

The title "Tender is the Night" is a line from a poem from John Keats wrote in 1819 called "Ode to a Nightingale":

tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (lines 35–40)

From Wikipedia: "Two versions of this novel are in print. The first version, published in 1934, uses flashbacks whilst the second revised version, prepared by Fitzgerald's friend and noted critic Malcolm Cowley on the basis of notes for a revision left by Fitzgerald, is ordered chronologically; this version was first published posthumously in 1951. Critics have suggested that Cowley's revision was undertaken due to negative reviews of the temporal structure of the book on its first release."

Audiobooks

If you listen to an audiobook, can you count that book as read?  I'd like to know what you think.

Arguments in favour:
1. Time committment.  I'm currently listening to "Heidi" and it's over 9 hours long.  "War and Peace" is over 60 hours long.  I think this is a shorter time than it would take me to read, due to the fact that I do a bit of re-reading and there are probably a lot of things I stop for. That said, it's still...

2. An Unabridged Work.  There is nothing different here than in a book.

Arguments against:
1. You don't actually read the book.  You could probably read some while you work out, but in the car... this is wasted time and can only be filled in audioformat.

2. Perceptual Differences.  You hear someone else's intonations which may change your perspective of characters and the overall feeling of the work

There are three things I look for when I am choosing an audiobook.
1. A book I don't think I'd get around to reading.
2. It's usually a classic, because of copyright reasons you can get these for free instead of paying for them on iTunes.
3. A good review - which usually means a good narration.  This is key, because you don't want to listen to anything taxing, expecially if it's going to be for 10 plus hours.

Thoughts on audiobooks and if they count as books you have 'read'?

Book Shopping | A Nice Haul

Downtown with Nick on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of the rain, we naturally gravitated towards books.  This was all my doing, because the Annex in Toronto is a good place between where Nick and I live so it's a natural meeting place.  Sometimes I leave both stores I frequent without anything, and other times I hit the jackpot.  My wallet always weeps, but I'm usually happy.

I found some beautiful Franklin Library copies and one nice Folio Society.  None had major flaws, bookplates attached (which I hate beyond belief), signatures, etc.  What was quite remarkable, was that they were all part of the Limited Edition category and were made in the late 70's (the leather on these Franklin's are typically of the greatest quality, in my non-expert opinion).  So I bought the following (restricted to five books):

• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.  I have yet to read this epic and now I have two copies.  Email me if you want a nice one on the cheap.
• The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck.  Again, I have two copies of this now... but I had been looking for this version for a LONG time.  I have a Reader's Digest version available... great quality and cheap.
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.  I absolutely love this book, and own multiple copies.  I have learned that if you ever find a Steinbeck or Hemingway Franklin/Easton then you buy it on the spot and ask questions later.
• The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron.  I had never heard of this (though the name Nat Turner is somewhere in my memory banks).  This is a novel that is supposed to be told from a Southern slave's perspective... perhaps it belongs in the same mentioning of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" which I also have yet to read.
• The Egyptians, by Alan Gardiner.  I have always wanted to learn more about them, and this book is a behemoth.  Jen doesn't think I will read them, as I have yet to touch five other civilizations in the series.  I think I'd start with the Egyptians... or maybe the Aztecs.

Two hundred bucks was a lot to blow in one store, but I have learned that you always regret the ones you didn't buy.  It's rare that your memory for a lost purchase dissipates.  I still remember a Charles Dickens set that I could have had for so cheap, but didn't get because I didn't want to carry the whole set-around in London.  Your back is always a small price to pay for a nice haul.

Movie Madness

Most of you who know me are aware that I have always been a large fan of the moving picture.  There were some months where I would watch 15 movies or more, including multiple films in a day.  In recent years, I've become less enamoured with most of the drivel that has come out of Hollywood and so now I'm down to about 3 movies a month.

I've been focusing a lot of time on the "top 100 movies of all-time", which of course is a difficult list to qualify.  I had been working on a list which combined multiple lists [when I get to my other computer, I will link to it], but I've probably been through about 70% of them [which include a lot of foreign films as well].  Most are difficult to find if you don't purchase them or have a subscription to an online service, so you really have to focus on the task.

What I've decided to do now, is to revisit some of the books I have read over the past three or four years with their movie versions.  In some cases, I have watched movies right after reading the books, but I usually find that I get really upset and end up pointing out discrepancies all the time.  The new approach is going to be watching movies after a significant time period so that I focus on re-enjoying some of the plot lines.  Will it ever be the same as reading the book?  No.  But I am curious to see how good some of the adaptations have been.

So, hopefully I will be posting a small review of each movie as I watch it.  Since I do belong to an online service, it's going to be largely based on what movies I add to the queue, which is now over 20 movies long.  Will keep you updated.

Book Beginnings | Friday, July 23

On every Friday, Page Turners posts a message asking for others to send a link to the opening sentence of a the novel that they are currently reading.  I just came across this, so I guess I missed out on last week but here goes for today.

The opening line from "Tender is the Night":

"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel."

First off, due to the spelling of "coloured", it's obvious that this is a Canadian edition.  Secondly, while this opening line is pleasant, it never really stuck with me and now that I'm about 70 pages from the end, I can't say that it does anything for me looking back except to tell me where all of this hullabaloo started [not chronologically, but in the story].  However, I do really enjoy the idea of a proud hotel, ignoring the concept of proud people within a hotel [which does nothing for me].

The Well-Educated Mind

I recently came across a link describing the best classic books to read, based on the intellectual experiences you will have with each.  Here's a blurb:

To find good classic books, there are trusted recommendations that can help us. The recommendations are found in the books How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, and The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, both of which I believe are high-quality books. You can read the books for complete information about their recommendations (with suggestions on how to read them), but here I will directly give you the titles of the books which are recommended by both of them.

The premise is that certain books will give you a difference perspective, which will change how you view the world.  So both these authors have suggested a list of books, plays, etc which are supposed to change your life, in a way.  I figured I may as well list them here and incorporate some of my comments.


Novel
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) - own it and always wanted to read it, but the large number of pages has kept me away.  I'm really waiting on Nick on this one, because we both purchased expensive leather copies and this book will be forever linked with him, in a good sort-of-way.  How you liking that Easton now, Nick? ;)

Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift) - I read this one, and when I think about how it has changed my life I can only pinpoint one part, though I enjoyed the novel.  Someone asked a very tiny human (in Lilliput, IIRC) how people looked when they were so much bigger than him and he said that they were actually very ugly because all their personal flaws could be seen to be magnified.  I think this checks me a lot in regards to materiality of people and things.

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - I cannot for the life of me figure out why this changes the lens at which you view the world.  Most of these Victorian novels teach me that it's always better just to tell the truth because it generally creates less drama.

Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) - Ever year I try to get people to read this in the book club, and every year it is voted down.  My knowledge of Dickens is circumspect, but I notice that very few want to read anything by them.  Perhaps they have poor experiences with his works in general?

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Moby-Dick (Herman Melville) - This is probably the only book I have started and not finished, and it was just due to the sheer size.  I should give it a go, because I still have a vivid image of Queequeg and his harpoon.

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Teaches one that guilt is powerful [doesn't the Tell-tale Heart do a better job of this?].  This is what sticks with me about this book, without re-reading it.  Oh, also... lock your doors when strangers come and don't be a crusty old lady that makes money off the poor or you're liable to find a hatchet in your back.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) - Embrace your childhood and always seek adventures.  I think I need to be reminded of this once or twice a year.  Switzerland will be the latest adventure.

The Trial (Franz Kafka) - Taught me that bureaucracy can always get worse, and sometimes you have no option but to co-exist in the system... and other times you should just run away screaming and never look back.


Autobiography and Memoir
The Confessions (Augustine)

The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne)

Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)

Walden (Henry David Thoreau) - This has been my top book to read every year, but every year someone in the book club votes it down.  I'm going to read it on my own, because I just have a strong gut feeling that I am meant to read this book.  I also feel that the time is nearly right for me to do so.  This book is classically referred to by all nature lovers and hippies.


History

The Histories (Herodotus)

The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)

The Republic (Plato) - Another book on the book club list, that people are afraid of.  Perhaps it's the old language... I'm really not versed in the subject matter.

Lives (Plutarch)

City of God (Augustine)

The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli) - I tried to read this in high school and didn't get very far.  It's short though, and at the end of the day what I keep hearing people ask is "do the ends justify the means?"  I think of this a lot, regardless of the fact that I haven't read this manifesto.

Utopia (Sir Thomas More) - Loved this book, though it was somewhat a slog due to the language in 1551.  Always fight for the things you believe in, and try to do the best you can for others and society as a whole.

The Social Contract (Jean Jacques Rousseau)

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon) - Nick and I both own this, and neither of us have read a page.  If you're going to read anything about the Roman Empire, I'm told this is where to start.  Be prepared for a long read though... there are typically three large volumes (some are spread into 8 - ie: The Folio Society)

Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx) - I have this on my Amazon wish list.  Christmas is only 5 months away, people! ;)


Drama

Agamemnon (Aeschylus)

Oedipus the King (Sophocles) - I guess this is where the term Oedipus complex comes from, so it's probably an incestuous read. :P

Medea (Euripides)

The Birds (Aristophanes)

Poetics (Aristotle)

Richard III (William Shakespeare)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare) - I don't get it. Perhaps they meant "Macbeth"?

Hamlet (William Shakespeare) - Not surprising, though I don't think it has created a different lens in which I view the world.  Perhaps I was too young when I read this - the details are a bit blurry.

Tartuffe (Moliere)

The Way of the World (William Congreve)

A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen)

Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)

No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)


Poet

The Iliad (Homer)

The Odyssey (Homer) - Every day I wake up and look at my bookshelves, I am saddened by the fact that I have only read snippets of this.

Odes (Horace)

Inferno (Dante Alighieri)

The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)

Sonnets (William Shakespeare)

Paradise Lost (John Milton) - Make sure you get a copy with Dore's prints in it.

Selected Poetry (William Wordsworth)

The Complete Poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
 
I seem to be afraid of a lot of these 'poetry' books, but I should really give them a shot.  I have six of them on my shelves, but I just never seem to get to them.
 
7 of 48 read is not a good track record.  Perhaps this is why I'm not learned good.

Book Shopping

This weekend I was feeling a little down in the dumps, and I couldn't figure out why.  It's probably the first weekend in the past 100 that I've been bored for the simple reason that I don't really get bored - I usually find there is just too much to do.

On Saturday, my girlfriend was studying so I took the opportunity of quiet time to catch up a bit on my reading.  I'm currently reading "Tender is the Night" for the book club and I started way later than usual this month because I was polishing up "The Mill on the Floss."  Since I'm hosting July's meeting, I figured that I shouldn't wait with this one until the last minute, so I'm now 100 pages from the end, which makes me feel a lot better.  Should be no problem to get it done in a week.

On Sunday, because I was bored I decided to walk down the main street in the little village that I live in.  I wasn't planning on buying anything other than freshly roasted coffee, but I stopped into a couple of book stores and couldn't help myself.  I ended up picking up two books, which meant some major restraint on my part. 

Despite not being very impressed with "A Man Without a Country", I decided to pick up "Armageddon in Retrospect" which was a collection of Vonnegut's short stories published posthumously.  I'm a decent Vonnegut fan, because we share a common history and because his books are always unique. 

The second book I purchased, against my better judgement (due to price) was a Guide to Switzerland.  I have been contemplating a trip there for about a week and I ended up purchasing this to force my hand a little bit.  Once you buy a guide book, it becomes more of a reality.  Dates still to be determined, but at least I've made the first step. 

My shelves are getting pretty packed, but they aren't as crazy as Shannon's... as her desk is starting to get infected.

Classics Challenge

I have felt a little out of the loop with all these "book challenges" going on, so I decided to participate.  Since I started a Classic Book Club, I figured that I would start off with an easy challenge.  So, I'm now participating in "Classics Challenge 2010".

April - Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

May - The Human Factor by Graham Greene
June - Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
July - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte [2nd novel - The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot]
Aug - Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sep - The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll [2nd novel- Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll]

Oct - Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

New Layout

I finally upgraded to a more dynamic layout, and I must say that I think it looks a lot better [comments welcome!].  I would have tried this before, but I honestly had no idea that this existed or how to do it.  I still don't get what Feedburner is, but I'm trying to mess around with that too.  I could use some help, so if you know anything about this stuff... please let me know.

(Parenthetically, I used to use Microsoft FrontPage and I wasn't that bad at it.  That said, things have changed since I was a kid).

The Mill on the Floss | George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

Let me preface by saying that this is the first time I have read anything by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). This is another work which set in the UK, written by a female author, and published in the Victorian era of the mid-19th century (1860). Based on that description, you could associate the work with a number of her peers... the Bronte sisters or Jane Austen. Looking back, the closest work I could relate it to would be “Jane Eyre”, which in my mind, is a compliment.


The story is about two siblings, Maggie and Tom Tulliver who grow up in the town of St. Ogg in the 1820-1830’s. It chronicles their lives from the ages of 8 and 10 respectively to adulthood. The novel centres on a few key themes: redemption, love and the “Divided Self.”

The main crisis in the Tulliver family details with the stubbornness of Mr. Tulliver, Maggie’s father. He is a proud man and his pride gets the better of him. When he gets into a legal battle with Mr. Wakem, he ends up losing all that he owns include his beloved Mill on the river Floss. Despite Mr. Wakem trying to make amends by employing Tulliver on the Mill (which he purchased from the bank), Tulliver never forgives Wakem and gets Tom to promise to eventually ruin Wakem [he swears it in the family Bible]. Tom spends his days working and his nights going to school (to be a bookkeeper) so he can earn enough money to pay off his father’s debts. He eventually makes some smart business decisions and “redeems” the family name. He has a falling out with Maggie, though, over her love for Mr. Wakem’s son Phillip. Tom feels as if all the hard work he is doing clearing the family name is being tarnished by Maggie’s actions.

While Tom is steadfast and unwavering on his one and only goal of clearing the family name, Maggie is continually struggling with her divided inner self. Her love for Phillip has been forbidden by Tom, and she continually fights with what she feels is doing the right thing (not seeing him) or ‘caving’ into her emotions. When she falls in love with her Cousin Lucy’s fiancé Stephen, she now risks upsetting her only friends, Lucy and Phillip. Stephen feels the same way for Maggie, but Maggie will not allow her emotions to get the better of her and she struggles with her feelings. Life is hard for Maggie, but in the end she is brought to some peace with Tom, and ultimately, herself.

Maggie’s constant need for love and affection from Tom and others around her is her Achilles’ heel. She lives life for others and is conflicted when she can’t live up to everyone’s unrealistic expectations of her. If she didn’t care so much about what others thought and felt, she could be happy. In the end she would have married Stephen, moved away and lived a nice life together away from St. Ogg. But Maggie feels so strongly with her own emotions, she wishes to cause no emotional harm to others. In the end, she harms both worse by trying too hard not to.

The novel had great characters including some of Maggie’s aunts and uncles who were among the most deplorable human beings you could have imagined. Evans was able to paint all these characters with both strengths and faults, which really gave you the impression that they were real people and not ideals. This was in contrast to some other Victorian novels (ex: “Pride and Prejudice”), which made this work all the more special.

The prose had some great moments, but instead of being scattered throughout the work, they were often article interjections which occurred quite frequently at the end of the chapters. If Evans would have interspersed these moments throughout the novel, I think it would have made the work much stronger.

This novel may mirror the struggles of the author, Mary Ann Evans, who had an affair with a married man. You get the feeling that only direct experience with struggle would lead a writer to portray that struggle with such a bleeding heart. The emotional turmoil in this novel was well described, the characters were honest and the story was enthralling. If I had any criticism other than the one point in the preceding paragraph, it would be the ending. While it tied up the loose ends, it really didn’t feel right... and I kept waiting for a Wakem ruin that was never to be.