I've just finished reading Tender is the Night and I feel as though it deserves some recognition....and finding my own words insufficient, I've posted some descriptions by other readers. If nothing else, this work is provokingly beautiful because of the painful truth embedded in it. I believe literature based on the sadder truths is slightly less enjoyable to read but all the more magnificent.


"Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, on his book, Tender is the Night.


¨Tender is the Night flows like a tone poem, vividly capturing the illusions and sickened foundations of its flawed protagonists, and the escapist existence in which they dwell. Herein lay ghosts, drifting through splendor, oblivious until it is too late, and then insensate still, crippled by self-imposed restrictions: the patterns of denial, dissipation and dream-death.¨


¨To define the myriad qualities of Tender is the Night into simplistic buzz-word recommendation: this is a haunting, occasionally stunning work, with beautifully lyrical prose and well-defined conflict, interspersed with casual insights into the urges/constructs of human reality.¨


¨F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by extension his work, was/is inescapably tied with the exuberant facade of the Jazz Era, an era defined (at least in the socialite sense) by its splendor and waste, its heedless optimism blind of cost. And though Scott basked in the cradle of this opulent "season," the author seething beneath the fly-by-night exterior could not help but be keenly aware of its follies and hypocrisies: his novels and short stories savagely depict the inward condemnation he felt. But unlike earlier efforts, this, Scott's last completed novel, was composed between 1925 and 1934, and the disintegration of the roaring 20's into the dust-bowl Depression of the 30's seems to me clearly represented in the progression from Tender is the Night's first to third books - the illusion has crashed and there is no regaining it, despite the determined dissipative efforts contrary.¨


And here are some quotes from the novel:

"You told me that night you'd teach me to play. Well, I think love is all there is or should be. Anyhow..."


"In the dead white hours of Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."


"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."


"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."


"All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love," Dicked mourned persistently. "Isn''t that true, Rosemary?"

"Do you know what time it is?" Rosemary asked.
"It's about half-past one."
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
"It's not a bad time," said Dick Diver. " It's not one of the worst times of the day."

"Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at."