At last I have read all the novels of Fitzgerald and now I can officially say that this novel is my favourite. Yes that is true, many professional literary critics consider it to be the most immature and imperfect work of Fitzgerald, but still I like it and nothing will change my opinion. This novel is a story of Amory Blaine. Or of Scott Fitzgerald? Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the author and the main characters for there are so many events and people taken from the writer's life - Princeton, military service in Europe and the Triangle Literary Club as well as Monsignor Darcy, Beatrice Blaine and Clara who are almost accurate copies of Fitzgerald's closest people. However we can't say that Fitzgerald and Amory Blaine are one and the same person. Amory is a collective image of many young people of the time including Fitzgerald himself.So who is this Amory Blaine? Let us see. he author himself labels him as "The Romantic Egotist". That is not quite true. Amory is self-centred but not selfish. how is that possible? Let the character speak for himself: "There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness". An extraordinary position, isn't it? And believe me, Amory does live according to this statement.Now it is understandable why Amory is "an egoist" but why "romantic"? The matter is that his notion of life is very idealized, his expectations about other people are high which often leads him to disappointment. Amory can see that emotions of many people surrounding him are false and he doesn't like it on the one hand but on the other has no idea what to do about it.Sometimes Amory becomes snobbish and arrogant but in this way he just tries to hide his self-doubt and in fact he really likes to communicate with other people, to get new friends and find out something new.Actually there is a simple and clear explanation for all the drawbacks of Amory's character and that is his upbringing. What would you expect from a child who has hardly seen his father once a ear and whose mother was busy either with herself or with her parties and the only way in which she educated her son was telling him some worldly gossips and fulfilling all his whims.It is logical to presuppose that being "an egoist" Amory is no able to love, but that is not so. He can love although his feelings are in most cases not deep, but very strong, often desperate, he falls in love easily and also easily falls out of it. Amory takes love for granted - you should make the most of it once you have fallen in love and simply forget it hen it ends. "For this is wisdom — to love and live, To take what fate or the gods may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, in time — let go"As you can see this character is very complex but what is great about him is that anybody can see himself in him if he looks closer. What is Amory's calling in life? That is his major problem. During the novel the protagonist changes plenty of hobbies and fascinations trying to find the best one. Amory is eager to become famous, no matter in which way, and he is trying to achieve his goal. He doesn't find it in the end, but he finds something much more valuable - himself. the whole novel is a long way of the main character to the understanding of himself and his own life. There is a great quote about it in the novel: "Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on — I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them".Amory is a personality from the very beginning, there is no denying of it. But he has a long way to go and in the end of this way, as the title of he last chapter suggests "The Egotist Becomes a Personage". And here finding his calling for Amory becomes just a matter of time.Now this was a story of Amory Blaine, but the book is not just about Amory, it is about the whole generation of young people, the Jazz Age generation, whose lives are endless line of parties, love affairs, cocktails, gossips about each other and other kind of fun. the key word for this generation is "easiness". Whatever happens to Amory and his friends their life remains easy and they easily forget the events that can bring bitterness into their lives. Sometimes it seems that they live some imaginary lives of their own, where nothing bad can happen, where there is always just fun and laughter, they live in their dreams and fantasies about the real life but not in this life itself. They see what they want to see and deny the rest. What do they live for? Neither of them knows, and neither wants to. But you can't run away from the real life forever and Amory is the first to feel it. It takes many sad events to make Amory realize that there is no escape from reality and one time or another the moment will come when you have to answer the questions "Who I am?" and "What is my aim in life?" and the sooner you find the answer, the better for you.
I Do Hate to Be A Spoiler, but...I must confess skim-reading “This Side Of Paradise” a couple of years back, dismissing the work as a rag bag and putting it down somewhere on Goodreads as “the first Coffee Table novel”. Before Christmas, I began delivering on a guilty self-pledge to plough through the tome word for word, and not a few weeks did pass before that mealy task was done. The verdict? It is more pastiche than rag bag, a distinction I endeavour to explain below.Of course, the novel has to be read by all serious students of Fitzgerald's work not simply because it was the first he published; launching his career, it became the fiction sensation of 1920-1. It first took off on the back of positive reviews from a brace of friendly critics (Rascoe & Mencken) who were keen to promote Fitzgerald's distinctly Young American voice. Thereafter, it soared on chutzpah & hype; and benefiting from the coast-to-coast coverage of publishing giant Scribners almost 50,000 copies were sold in little over a year. It may be the first novel to depict the return of the US Expeditionary Force from Flanders, and by pre-dating Faulkner's “Soldier's Pay” and Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” by half a decade, it delineates the start of a literary movement of which the latter was to coin the term, “Lost Generation”.That books sell through clever marketing is clear, but a certain amount of consumer satisfaction is also required. What appealed to 1920s readers is slightly more complex. No doubt, fascination with the lives of the rich would have kept many eyes on the page. Sex plays a major part, too. Of course, Fitzgerald was no purveyor of smut and the novel presented little that would have been worthy of any second glances by Jazz Age censors. It may therefore have benefited from the vogue for risqué without incurring any of the risks. Through a mixture of obtuseness and subtlety, Fitzgerald takes his reader from scandal-class kisses at posh house parties to the cheap hotel rooms of debauchery proscribed by the Mann - 'White Slavery' - Act of 1910. Also of topical note was the start of Prohibition in the very year of publication, which may have increased sales to the clientèle – or would-be clientèle - of the speak-easy. Most of all, though, “This Side of Paradise” is a book about young adults, written by a young adult, for young adults. It was the start of the era when law-making would begin to dog the lives of young Americans and lead, ultimately, to the revolutionary Beat Generation that came after the Second World War. Having laid that claim for it, however, it must be said that the text as a whole is not an easy read. Doubtless many copies would have fallen open at well-marked, well-read passages.A handbag? Pastiche? Influenced by the likes of Compton MacKenzie’s “Sinister Street” and Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man”, its many passages of brittle prose are cut, for heaven's sake, with much damp poetry and windy dialogue. It's as though the contents of Zelda's diaries (the style of which Fitzgerald carefully deployed in drafts of his early novel, “The Romantic Egoist”) had been tipped out onto a large refectory table, cherry picked and then repackaged between leaves of his own stuff. Expensively produced stuff, that is. All the same, stuff. At one point our anti-hero Amory Blaine walks out of his job at a New York advertising agency complaining,“...it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you”.We never get to read his copy, but we are tied to the mast while Fitzgerald does impressions of Endymion The Vogon,ttt“The shadow of a doveFalls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;And down the valley through the crying treesThe body of the darker storm flies; bringsWith its new air the breath of sunken seasAnd slender tenuous thunder...”Is this the writer who gave us “The Great Gatsby”? You better believe it! How did the old Iggy Pop number go? “Success/Here comes my Chinese rug”.The main characters are clearly life-meets-literature drawn, from Blaine (an amalgam of Fitz himself with various Princeton bonhomies), his fairy godmother Ma, an actual Monsignor, a succession of débutantes (amongst which Fitz's real-life loves Zelda Sayres and Ginevra King are measured out in coffee spoons) plus lesser souls for whom the East Coast of the nineteen-teens would have been an anthem stomp for disaffected youth. It's an artificial book in as much as it's populated by artificial people. There is no plot, no ending to give away. So here's my spoiler: some die, others go on to other things.
What do You think about This Side Of Paradise (1998)?
after reading: Meh. Meh, meh, meh. See, this is the problem with re-reading books that shine so bright in your memory — sometimes they just don't live up. I mean, there's really no reason I shouldn't have loved this book. It's filled with philosophical musings and snappy, flirty dialogue; it's pleasantly disjointed, very slice-of-life-y; it's definitely full of verve and probably powerful ideas.... but I just couldn't get into it. I was in fact very impatient throughout. I found Amory Blaine to be a bit of a narcissistic bore, all the female characters thoroughly self-obsessed and false, and most of the other characters either inconsistent, un-memorable, or not believable. I nearly always feel guilty about not liking a book. In this case my guilt is compounded by the fact that someone who once meant a great deal to me loved the shit out of Fitzgerald, and this book in particular; in fact, it's his copy, full of his underlinings and nearly destroyed due to the number of times it's been caught in in rainstorms, that I still have. But Nick, I'm sorry. F. Scott, I'm sorry. I just don't love this like I used to.
—Oriana
So, I hadn't read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald besides The Great Gatsby and I'd been meaning to give some of his other work a try. I was in the car for a long time the other day and a copy of this book was lying on the floor so I just picked it up and started reading it. In the end ... it was just okay, in my opinion.I think Fitzgerald writes beautifully, but I felt that this book was really lacking in terms of plot/story. I think books about day-to-day life can certainly be interesting, but in this case I couldn't bring myself to care about the protagonist. He's essentially just a conceited asshole––and he's supposed to be, as far as I can tell ... but even though conceited assholes can be interesting characters, I just wasn't invested in Amory's story. And none of the characters really interested me, for that matter. There were a lot of minor characters that just came and went and didn't seem to serve a lot of purpose.On top of that, I found the pacing awkward; months or years would go by in the span of a paragraph or two, and a lot of it read like a summary rather than an actual story. There were also long streams of poetry and a random section written in play format, and those parts were kind of tedious to get through.Over all, I had mixed feelings about this book. I loved the writing for the most part, and I kind of see what Fitzgerald was trying to get at, but it just didn't work for me. I still hope to try his other books, though.
—Brigid *Flying Kick-a-pow!*
Someone needed to tell F. Scott Fitzgerald to stop writing poetry and including it in this book as the work of his characters. You have to read it, because it's freaking F. Scott Fitzgerald and you don't skim the man's work, but honestly this was insufferable. There were passages in this book that I loved, and parts that I couldn't put down: but overall the work seemed uneven. The plot structure wasn't really there. The whole focus of the book is simply one character's development as a person from childhood to mid-twenties, and that development isn't always believable. That said, there was a lot of playfulness in this book that made it fun to read. Midway through, you suddenly have three chapters that are written entirely in play format. Towards the end you enter Amory Blaine's head with a series of questions and answers he's asking and answering for himself, followed by a page of stream of consciousness. These deviations, while abrupt, give effective, fascinating glimpses into the characters' lives that traditional prose could not deliver. Recommended kinda!
—Adrianne Mathiowetz
