*4,5 stars* Tender Is the Night is my first attempt at reading one of Fitzgerald’s works. Before I started this book, I knew very little about Francis Scott Fitzgerald. I knew he was probably the most important American author of the 1920’s. His books were about rich, privileged people that turned out to be desperate and broken. Beautiful prose, breathtaking, cosmopolitan settings, complex characters.I’ve been lucky(?) enough in my life, to have known a few of extremely wealthy people. Some of them so rich, to live in imposing, three-story buildings with glorious gardens and huge halls reserved for parties, in the most exclusive areas of my city, worth millions of euros.And if there’s something I learned from my experience is that almost every one of them was a total mess.From affairs to mental problems, from psychological abuse to heavily use of drugs and meds. They covered and hid it by parading their wealth: expensive clothes and accessories, crazy parties, vacations, activities. One of them even had a personal stylist who made fashion shows in her house. Some of them were super nice, some unbearably evil and shallow.What they all had in common, though, was a profound desperation. Something innate in each one of them, a sense of emptiness they couldn’t fill, no matter how many friends they sought through their power. Being European, I also knew many of the places described in the book: the French Riviera, Austria, Rome.It felt almost surreal to read details of cities and Countries I’ve visited in the last ten years of my life in such a vivid and detailed manner. Ninety years ago they were pretty much the same.I found myself agreeing with Fitzgerald's view of the atmosphere and feelings evoked by the French Riviera: immutable, lonely, melancholic. Why am I making such a long premise? Well, because I needed to, in order to explain how many familiar aspects I found in this book.I’m not going to say much about the plot, as always. Tender Is the Night is divided into three parts: in the first one, we meet Rosemarie Hoyt; young, charming actress that travels around Europe, ends up in Southern France and meets Dick and Nicole Diver and their children. She’s immediately drawn to the married couple and their charm and exuberance. She’s independent for her young age, traveling often by herself, managing her money and extricating herself from admirers and aspiring lovers. She develops a crush for Dick, gorgeous and funny, always available to help friends and to make them feel at ease. She also has a fascination for Nicole, elegant, a bit detached from reality, she comes across as cold and snob. Dick and Nicole are a wonderful couple, with beautiful children, money, possibilities and lots of friends. But there’s something they hide, something on what their marriage is based and that’ll be the end of them as a couple.In the second part, we find out more about the Divers. How they met, where they met, how their relationship developed, what their dreams where.In the third and final one, we’re in the near future and the annihilation of the Divers’ marriage becomes the main focus of the story.I’ve had issues with this book. I didn’t understand a lot of words and parts. Had to look for definitions online and spent a lot of time pondering about the plot and its characters.I honestly cannot say that I have a favorite one and one I couldn’t stand. They’re all amazingly flawed and nothing short of a masterpiece - psychologically speaking.How can you not admire Rosemarie for being this free-spirited, strong and sexually emancipated young woman who doesn’t want to settle down and simply be a wife? I don’t care if she falls for a married man, that’s not the point. She knows what she wants and if Dick and Nicole’s marriage were a happy one, she wouldn’t have succeeded into “seducing” him. You can’t also help but feeling a bit sad for her, as well as for the other protagonists. She’s grown up with her mother, and they way she sees Dick at the beginning and how their relationship evolves in the first part of the book (the omnipresent “Daddy’s Girl” movie), well it looks like she needs more a father figure, than a lover. I got the feeling that she represented for Dick not only something that could make him feel young and full of possibilities again, but also what Nicole had not been, when she was Rosemarie’s age. Like he could’ve had someone as strong and self-assured as the young actress and not someone so insecure, who constantly needed him.Nicole, fragile and dependent from her older sister, raped by her father, taken to a psychiatric clinic and left there until Dick came and felt the responsibility (and allure?) to cure her. His most difficult and challenging case, as well as a source of incredible affluence for a relatively modest man.As for Dick, I loved how he changed (because of the money), from a brilliant psychiatrist, who published scientific books about mental illness and was this level-headed - probably a bit arrogant - promising doctor that every woman wanted, to this bitter, broken alcoholic repudiated by everyone. His and Nicole characters are the ones who fascinated me the most. I’ve underlined many passages about them both, especially at the end of the book. Dick only wanted to be loved and admired. To help people, cure them, to be remembered for his works and his methods, but ended up losing his wife, his family and the same wealth that made him that way. “He would have to go fix this thing that he didn’t care a damn about, because it had early become a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment he had realized that he was the last hope of a decaying clan. On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choise, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved."He was probably dazzled by the Warrens’ importance and wealth, to think that helping Nicole, fix her, would’ve made him loved, would’ve earned their gratitude.But he was only used by them , as a mean to help the youngest member of their family.Nicole. Ah, I loved her. She leaves the husband who’s sacrificed his career for her. (Has he? Or was he simply too quick to surrender to the enormous appeal the Warren family incarnated? Was he really a victim, or an egoist?) She loved him, but mostly because she needed him in order to be “fine”.He taught her how to behave and overcome her crisis. He symbolized the calm and control she could never muster. He also represented the older man who wouldn’t hurt her, with whom she could have a healthy relationship. I don’t think they didn’t love each other. What I think is that what bound them at first wasn’t it. It came along, with the passing of time and sharing their lives.Dick represented a fascination for her, while he saw her as a challenge and was flattered by her interest in him.She was so young and sick when she first met him, that he shaped her, he shaped the way she behaved and thought.It was only when he started to succumb to alcohol and depression, and she realized she had fallen in love with another man - with someone who didn’t see her only as a “sick person” - that she could be her real self.“You know, you’re a little complicated, after all.”“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really- I’m just a- I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”“Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now ans in the future was to delude herself…Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”“The hour with the hair-dresser seemed one of the wasteful intervals that composed her life, another little prison. The coiffeuse in her white uniform, faintly sweating lip-rouge and cologne reminded her of many nurses.”Someone might say that they’re flawed and messed-up.But who, in real life, isn’t? Every single thing that happens to us, shapes us into the people we become.The more dramatic it is, the more it messes us up.I really needed to read something like Tender Is the Night, to feel close to people so desperate and at fault.To feel normal in all the abnormality that surrounds me. And Fitzgerald’s prose is one you can never forget. The way he describes places and people, it’s outstanding.I’ll make sure to read his other books, too.I recommend this book to all the lovers of literature and complex characters.
How is one to feel about a protagonist who frequently displays signs of elitism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia, finds himself worryingly attracted to young girls, has no goal in life except to make himself useful to damsels in distress, and drinks away his career and marriage, ending up a mere shadow of his former self? Is one supposed to regard him as a tragic hero? Is one to sympathise with him? And if one does sympathise with him, is that because of the way he was written, or rather because we are aware that he is a thinly veiled version of the author himself, a giant of early-twentieth American literature?Those were some of the questions I pondered after reading Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last finished novel, and possibly his most autobiographical one. Set in France and Italy in the 1920s, it tells the story of two wealthy American expats, Dick and Nicole Diver (largely based on the author and his wife Zelda), who seem to others the most glamorous couple ever, 'as fine-looking a couple as could be found in Paris', but are finding their private lives increasingly less glamorous. We first see the couple through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, a young and naive American actress holidaying in Europe. Rosemary falls madly in love with suave Dick, but also admires angelic Nicole. After about 130 pages during which Rosemary hangs out with the Divers and nearly embarks on an affair with Dick, the narrative stops and goes back in time to tell the story of Dick and Nicole's marriage, which is considerably more complicated than Rosemary realises. Nicole, it turns out, has a history of mental illness, and Dick is both her husband and the doctor treating her -- a recipe for disaster, obviously. Being a tale of needy people, broken relationships, loss of purpose and wasted potential, Tender Is the Night is quite a depressing read, and one's appreciation of it largely depends on one's tolerance for that kind of thing. If you like your books bleak and tragic, chances are you'll appreciate Tender Is the Night. If not, you might want to steer clear of it.I generally love a good tragedy, but I confess I wasn't overly impressed with Tender Is the Night. For a book which has garnered so many rave reviews, I found it remarkably flawed. Fitzgerald himself seems to have somewhat agreed with me. Despite referring to Tender Is the Night as his masterpiece and being shocked by its lack of critical and commercial success, he began reconstructing it a few years before his death, placing the flashback chapters at the beginning and making all the textual alterations required by this change. However, he died before he could finish the project, or perhaps he abandoned the project as not worth completing (no one seems to know for sure). A friend of his, Malcolm Cowley, then completed the revision, and for years this was the standard edition of the book. However, the Cowley version has fallen into scholarly disfavour (or so Penguin informs me), and several publishers, Penguin included, now use the first edition, the one that Fitzgerald thought needed revision. Apparently, there are no fewer than seventeen versions of the novel extant, which says much about how satisfied Fitzgerald was with his own work. My guess? Not very much.I read a version based on the first edition of the book, and to be honest, I can see why Fitzgerald felt it needed some work. Tender Is the Night felt very disjointed to me. To a certain extent, this was because of the aforementioned non-linear structure, which felt a bit jarring to me. However, as far as I'm concerned, that is not the book's only problem, nor even its biggest one. What most annoyed me was the way in which the perspective keeps shifting. Fitzgerald uses an omniscient narrator in Tender Is the Night, but not consistently so; the story is always written from a certain character's perspective. Sometimes the perspective is Rosemary's, sometimes it's Dick or Nicole's; even the minor characters have stretches of the story told from their perspectives, often on the same page as a main character's perspective. To me, these shifts in point of view often felt haphazard, not to mention a little jarring. I didn't think they were particularly effective, either, as they hardly build on each other and don't provide any information that couldn't be gleaned from a 'regular' omniscient narrator. I may be in a minority here, but I think the book would have benefited from a more consistent approach to perspective. The story itself is a bit haphazard, as well. It occasionally drags, it has little plot, and there are quite a few scenes and storylines which don't really go anywhere. Among several other seemingly unlikely scenes, the book contains a murder, a shooting and a duel, none of which is fully integrated into the story, and none of which is given proper significance. Scenes are introduced and then left so randomly that you have to wonder why Fitzgerald bothered to include them at all. At the risk of being unkind and judgemental, I guess that's what being an alcoholic will do for an author: it gives you wild ideas, but prevents you from carrying them out properly.Which brings me to the characterisation. I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but I felt that Fitzgerald's vaunted characterisation was a bit 'off' in this novel. Many of the minor characters are sketchily drawn, whereas the main characters are described well (sometimes brilliantly so), but never properly explained. While Fitzgerald does a good (and occasionally excellent) job of sharing his protagonists' feelings, he hardly ever bothers to explain their motivations. This particularly bothered me in the parts written from Dick Diver's point of view, as Dick is supposed to be a psychiatrist. By rights, he should be analysing people actions and motivations all the time, and asking lots of questions. However, Dick hardly ever asks questions. He does not even ask himself questions. He never wonders why he is so drawn to young girls, or what it is in him that causes him to need to be their saviour. He just observes other people in a way of which any intelligent person (trained psychologist or not) would be capable, and then describes their behaviour in a few felicitous phrases. For this and other reasons, I didn't buy Dick Diver as a psychiatrist. Fitzgerald may have read up on psychology (and undoubtedly learned a lot from the doctors who treated his own wife), but I never found his alter ego convincing as a psychiatrist, let alone a brilliant psychiatrist. To me, Dick has 'writer' written all over him.It's a pity I kept finding such flaws, because Tender Is the Night obviously had the potential to be amazing. It has all the right ingredients: interesting (albeit snobbish and bored) characters, powerful themes, evocative (albeit frequently vague) writing, you name it. And the story certainly doesn't lack in pathos. It is quite harrowing to watch Dick Diver, a supposedly brilliant and popular man who never lives up to his potential and is increasingly torn asunder by money, alcoholism and his failed marriage to a mentally ill woman, go to pieces, becoming, in his own words, 'the Black Death' ('I don't seem to bring people happiness any more'). The fact that this was Fitzgerald writing about himself, about his own frustrations and shattered dreams, adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Even so, Tender Is the Night ended up leaving me fairly cold, as I simply didn't care for Dick enough to be genuinely moved by his descent into failure. While others may find Dick a swell guy, I myself found his complacency and lack of purpose grating, his alcoholism exasperating, and his brilliance skin-deep. I seem to be alone in this opinion, but I stand by it. In summary, then, I enjoyed and admired aspects of Tender Is the Night, but I don't think they add up to a great whole. While I appreciate Fitzgerald's brutal honesty and the masterful way in which he evokes mutual dependence, isolation and frustration, I can't shake off the feeling that the book could have been much better than it ended up being. And this pains me, as I hate wasted potential as much as Fitzgerald himself seems to have done. As it is, Tender Is the Night is in my opinion not just a book about wasted potential, but an example of wasted potential. It is fitting, I suppose, but no less disappointing for that.3.5 stars, rounded down to three because I really didn't like it as much as many of the books I have given four stars lately.
What do You think about Tender Is The Night (1995)?
638.tTender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgeraldرمان «لطیف است شب»، داستان روانپزشک جذابی ست به نام «دیک دایور»، که همسری زیبا و ثروتمند، ولی روانپریش به نام «نیکول» دارد. ورود «دیک» به رمان، در فصل نخست، و در ساحل رویایی ریوریرای فرانسه، اتفاق میافتد. نویسنده «گتسبی بزرگ» بازهم میدرخشد، اینها نخستین تصاویری هستند، که از جغرافیای اروپا بر صفحه نقش میبندند، نقل از متن کتاب: «بر کرانهی دلپذیر ریویرای فرانسه... هتل و ساحل درخشان آن که به جانمازی آجری رنگ میمانست... در تمام منطقه فقط همین ساحل در حرکت و جنب و جوش بود...» پایان نقل. شخصیت «دیک» با پیشروی داستان، به دلیل بیماری همسرش دچار تزلزل میشود. جرقهی فرود از فراز او، با دلدادگی «رزماری» ستاره نوپای هالیوودی به وی، با شروع دوباره حملات روانپریشانهی «نیکول»، آغاز میشود. اگر ابتدای رمان، یعنی سواحل دریا را، مقایسه کنیم با خطوط پایانی داستان، شخصیت «دیک» انگار دیگر شده است، و ایشان دیگر آن مرد موفق همیشگی نیست: «از شهری به شهر دیگر...» و این جملهی پایانی کتاب است، و انگار نقطهی پایان «دیک دایور» باشد، و البته که در فروترین فرود. آزادمنشی «دیک»، که با آن موجهای روان و آرام دریا بر فراز بود و معنی مییافت، حالا جایش را به درماندگی داده و فرود از فراز به سرانجام رسیده است. «لطیف است شب» که عنوان شاعرانهای هم هست، نامش را از شعر «کیتس» برگرفته: «بر بالهای نامرئی شعر / ذهن کندم چه گیج است و عقب / در کنار تو چه لطیف است شب / ماه ملکه کامیاب نشسته بر تخت / و پریان ستاره گرد او پر طرب / ولی اینجا تاریک است شب.» کتاب جزو صد رمان برتر قرن بیستم است. «ارنست همینگوی» بارها «لطیف است شب» را بهترین اثر دوست صمیمیاش، «اسکات» نامیده است. ا. شربیانی
—Ahmad Sharabiani
Tender is Night or so they say. I say tender is a woman's psyche, and the man's ego that tries to make it strong. Too bad both of them suffer from a severe case of asshatitis. "Tender is the Night" is the story of Dick Diver and his Wife Nicole. You don't actually find this out until a fourth of the way into the book. At first we meet the happy couple through the eyes of Rosemary, a young actress from America with a Norman Bates styled affinity for "Mother." She quickly latches onto Mr. Diver, h
—Jonathan
Ok, well, this is a hard thing to do, to give F. Scott Fitzgerald two stars. Who am I to criticize one of the (supposedly) greatest authors and literary geniuses ever? But the truth is that although I do aprecciate his excellent writing technique and many wonderful passages in this book (hence the extra star), I failed to connect with this book in any way whatsoever. I didn't care for any of the characters and their joys and sorrows left me completely unmoved. I just could not care less what happened to them and that to me is one of the greatest 'crimes' a writer can commit. I know it may very well just be me and my inability to aprecciate the great art of Fitzgerald, but reading this book added nothing to my life or to my understanding of life.(I did find many reviews online though that ecchoed exactly what I felt and thought while reading this book.) It would take too long to go into more details about why this book just didn't do it for me, so I will just leave it at that.I have to add, however, that I will still read 'The Great Gatsby' because many of those readers who felt the way I did about 'Tender Is The Night', also said that Fitzgerald had one great book in him and Gatsby was it. I really hope so because technically and stylistically he is a great writer and could have a lot to give.
—Erelin
