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 ...
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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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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel "Tender is the Night" is a story of part of America's "Lost Generation" in the period following WW I. Most of the story is set on the French Riviera in the 1920s with a large cast of wealthy, dissipated and idle Americans with little to do with themselves. The book tells of the fall of Dick Diver, a promising and idealistic young American psychiatrist. As an intern in Zurich, Dick had married a beautiful wealthy young American woman, Nichole Warren, who had been his patient. Nichole had severe and lasting psychiatric issues resulting from sexual abuse by her father. While on the Riviera, several years into the marriage, Dick is attracted to a callow 18-year old American movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt. Although he resists Rosemary's advances at the time, her memory stays with him. She and Dick have a brief affair a few years later. Dick ultimately sees her as shallow. By that time, his life has dissipated through drink, idleness, problems with Nichole, and the corrupting effect of Nichole's money. Nichole leaves Dick, and he returns to the States for a lonely, wasted life. It is all very sad.
The story is haunting, effectively organized, and well told. The opening scenes take place on the French Riviera with Dick seemingly at the height of his powers as a socialite and budding medical writer. After an extended opening, the story doubles back to Dick's life in Zurich and his fateful courtship of Nichole. We then witness Dick Diver's inexorable deterioration, alcoholism, and degeneracy, and the break-up of his marriage. The writing is eloquent and spare, with good characterizations of mostly unappealing people and pictures of places. Fitzgerald shows the rootlessness of a class of Americans after the Great War and the corrupting effects of money and idleness. Dick Diver's story, I thought, was sad and sentimental rather than tragic. There is little of the hero about him.
"Tender is the Night" is the story of wandering lives, lost innocence, and the waste of human potential. In some ways, the book reminded me of the writings of the Beats, following WW II. It is a 20th Century American book that rewards knowing.
Robin Friedman
linda ganger
Aug 1, 2013
oldie but goody
I haven't read this book for a while;but it never gets old. enjoy
readersreader
Mar 10, 2009
the world that once was for some
This book tells the story of American psychologist Dick Diver and his wife, the wealthy but psychologically unstable Nicole. The setting is the small French coastal town of Tarmes, between the late 1920's and the early 1930's. The book portrays a rypical Fitzgerald fictional universe: wealthy, idle, sophisticated, and in many ways "troubled". The book also deals with the effect wealthy Americans had on Europe culture. If you like tales of the roaring 20's, I think you will like this book
Maggy
Oct 9, 2007
Amazing!!
This semi-autobiographical novel describes the struggles of Dick and Nicole Diver as they strive to keep their marriage together despite Nicole's increasingly devastating mental disorder. It's probably the most difficult to understand of Fitzgerald's works, but it is also one of his masterpieces. If you are interested in the "Lost Generation" writers, the Jazz Age, or mental disorders/their effects, you will probably love this book.
