For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. This map of France helps us understand the setting of Tender is the Night. Look at the far right corner of the map. See Cannes? Go west, up the coast, about five miles to get to where the story begins, on the beach. Chronologically, the story begins in The mother's face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way.
However, one's eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart.
Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood -- she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her. As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said: "Something tells me we're not going to like this place.
They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact -- moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations. I'll wire right away for steamer tickets. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel.
When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated -- it was too bright to see.
Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive. Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.
As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed.
She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively.
As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore.
The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out. Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth -- the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own.
They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand. Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. Neither, despite its ambition, does it achieve the scope of Gatsby largely because of its structural flaws. Not surprising as much of his material was in the midst of happening in real life: Zelda, for example, was essentially a healthy young woman when he begun this.
However, it was his personal favourite of his books and you begin to understand why in the second half which dramatically improves when Fitzgerald hones in on his two central characters, makes them more explicitly himself and Zelda and their volatile doomed marriage. Dick, a bit of a self-satisfied bore when he's in command of his life and heralded as an organiser of gaiety, becomes more interesting when he's on the back foot.
The writing improves too and there are many truly beautiful passages and insights, especially on the underlying causes of human failure. And by the end Scott has evoked a generous measure of the tragic poignancy of his marriage to Zelda.
View all 20 comments. Oct 06, Vessey rated it really liked it Shelves: romance. It is also a story about loneliness. But mostly, it is about the need to love and belong. Dick Diver falls in love with mentally ill woman and marries her. But he never truly finds happiness with her. He falls in love with an young actress, but he never gets to be with her, because his connection with and his love for his sick wi SPOILERS "He wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come.
He falls in love with an young actress, but he never gets to be with her, because his connection with and his love for his sick wife are too strong. And he goes through life alone, leading a battle that cannot be won. This is a beautiful and touching book, but it is also adamant in the way it shows what loneliness, what falling in love with the wrong person can do to us.
Still, does loving a person you cannot be happy with mean that you have truly chosen as much as love is choice the wrong person? For which do we need bigger strength? To quit loving such person or to go on loving them? Can a distinction be made? Do we love a person only when we believe there is a chance for them to turn into what we need them to be and for us to be happy with them? I believe that when we love, it is forever. Love that dies is no love, unless the object of our love changes severely.
Is there such thing as loving only with a part of yourself or is love something that sweeps you completely and you love with your whole being? Do humans have the potential, the depth to love absolutely and completely?
Or is love fragmented, like we are fragmented? Is it possible for the part that loves and the part that stays indifferent or even hates to be two sides of the same coin, two faces of the same feeling?
Dick Diver goes on loving his wife, but a part of him grows cold. This terrible contradiction comes not from weakening of his love for her, but from his inability to connect to her. Are love and connection the same thing? I thought so. I am not so sure anymore. He loves her, but feels disconnected from her.
Or is the strongest love the one because of which we are ready to make any sacrifices and accept even the smallest particles, when even the smallest piece is better than nothing, when we are ready to sacrifice our life, our pride, our very essence? Dick Diver feels like he has lost an essential part of himself, a part that leaves any real feeling in him incomplete.
If we sacrifice too much for the loved one, so much as we no longer feel as ourselves, can love survive? Does true love transcends all? Which is the stronger? The love we bear for the other person or our sense of self? When the sense of self vanishes, do we keep loving? Would Dick have been happier had he left Nicole? Would he have been happy with Rosemary? I think not. When we love somebody, we bear all their baggage, their pain overwhelms us, it becomes a part of us, but the same is valid for their joy, for everything amazing they are and everything amazing they give us.
We are overwhelmed, but the mere fact that we love someone so deeply as to let ourselves be overwhelmed gives us a sense of security and belonging and fullness. Or both? When we truly love, how much do we belong to ourselves and how much to the other person? As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes. The relationship between Dick and Nicole, however strong or weak, keeps on living and tearing him apart.
When the relationship does not bring us happiness, when the pain prevails, is it still love? Does true love mean that no matter the circumstances, we can always find some happiness, some spark there? Or do we love even when the passion no longer exists and desperation and emptiness fill our hearts and minds and hang over us and touch us like a pale, cold sun, so alike and unlike the real one that once kept it all alive, but has now melted and disappeared into space, leaving us merely with the memory?
It was not so much infatuation as a romantic memory. She was still his girl Tender Is the Night left me incredibly satisfied and yearning at the same time. But with Dick himself being the main focus and how his love and longing, pain and loneliness affect his life and personality, they were more of a catalyst for him than actual characters in the novel. I think that had Fitzgerald given them more personality, this would have been a five-star book for me.
Still, it was a great experience. One I am tempted to go back to one day. Read count: View all 32 comments. Jun 11, Kelly rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: everyone. Shelves: fiction , 20th-century-early-to-mid , owned , worlds-lost-dead-and-dying , grand-opera. This is my favorite Fitzgerald book. I read it back to back with This Side of Paradise last year, which was an interesting experiment. I had the young, beautiful, self-confident Fitzgerald and the Fitzgerald of post-Zelda's craziness, dark dark alcoholic Fitzgerald.
Besides showing obviously how much his skills had improved, it showed the sheer range he was capable of as well. This is a dark, depressing novel. Loss, loneliness, isolation, desolation. It does not end well. But the sheer power of This is my favorite Fitzgerald book.
But the sheer power of the prose, and just how completely lost everything is here can't fail to get to you. The story is so tight, well put together, flows along without a hitch. It sinks you slowly lower and lower and lower until you're hardly aware of just how dark of a place the novel has gone. And then all of a sudden things evaporate, and there you are. Just like Fitzgerald. Wandering off the last page.
I recommend it to everyone. Do give it a try. View all 14 comments. Jun 23, Jonathan rated it it was ok Recommends it for: people who don't do anything without first consulting Mother.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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. 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.
Diver, h Tender is Night or so they say. Diver, his charms no match for her ignorance and youth. They all hang out together, doing rich people things like eating, and hanging out at the beach, and hating minorities It is the 20's after all , and all other sorts of things that make you want to slash the tires on their Rolls.
He doesn't actually do much psycho analyzing, but spends most of his time wondering why he married Nicole in the first place and developing a drinking problem. Turns out Nicole is cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and Dick married her with some God complex of trying to save her.
But all he ends up doing is ruining himself. Book three continues the downfall, kind of told through Nicole's eyes. Dick falls further and further down the rabbit hole while Nicole seems to see daylight in the fog of her crazy. She ends up pulling a Dick Diver. Head out of the gutter people but with the opposite reaction of what it did to him. I think. This book isn't necessarily long, though it feels like it.
Long passages of time pass in one paragraph, making it confusing and a rather dull read. None of the characters are likable, and I think you end up just wishing all of them went the way of Abe North. That story line was never really resolved. They say it took him forever to write this and it kind of feels like it. It doesn't connect very well and you wonder how much is Fitz's desperate cry for help from his own life full of money and ruin.
Can anyone tell me why I am supposed to love Fitzgerald so much? May 10, Shovelmonkey1 rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: people who want to see beyond Gatsby. Shelves: bookcrossing-books , books , read-in For the longest time I lived an F. Scott Fitzgerald free existence. The name was familiar enough although I mostly associated it with those bulky Penguin Classics which are prone to making me break out in a cold-sweat.
Weighty tomes burdened by commentary on class difference, forbidden or tormented or doomed romance, some of which are drier than a mouthful of Jacob's Crackers. Scott Fitzgerald-free no longer! And how glad does this make me? I read The Great Gatsby a couple of months ago and decided to go for a second hit with Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald's almost autobiographical tale of gilt edged glitz which conceals the slow ripening of mental decay on the French Riviera.
But first I need to get the childishness out of the way. I approached this book with all literary seriousness - arched eyebrow, wire rimmed glasses and a suitable severe chignon and after a medium sized smirk at introduction to the principle character with the manly moniker, Dick Diver, I was prepared to be serious again.
Then it hit me. Page 4. There it was. And then I rolled off the sofa, laughing. And so begins my encounter with Tender is the Night, which is otherwise quite serious but in places, far from tender. Published in , at a time of economic austerity, Fitzgerald's emotionally disturbed tale of rich people being a bit sad, but still being rich, was not well received and was soundly panned in a number of reviews.
Presumably the people of America waved their empty plates, wiped the dust from their eyes and shouted "Yes life is not great but try an empty belly, Dust Pneumonia and burying your own children".
Mental health and sexual abuse, are by no means, trifling issues and they are key issues in Tender is the Night, however set against a back drop of yachts, lavish parties and luxury mansions at a time of national economic catastrophe, well presumably they just seemed a bit less important. Add to this to the fact that frankly, none of the characters are particularly likeable, well you can see why people looked askance at the time.
Dick Diver falls into a number of unfortunate but obvious traps. Marries way out of his league, marries a mentally unstable patient with whom he was originally professionally involved and then to cap it all, has an affair. Way to go Dick. I'm pretty sure that the Hippocratic oath probably says "don't do this" against all of these possible actions.
Because this book is based on Fitzgerald's own experiences with his wife Zelda it is better than Gatsby. Not happier, not brighter, not more exhilarating to read but it has a clarity that makes the characters more real.
After all, nobody said you had to like them or their actions. View all 13 comments. This book was a hot mess and such a disappointment compared to "The Great Gatsby" which is a favourite of mine. Right from the beginning, I had no idea where this dishevelled story was going, and having now finished it I'm still not sure what the overall point of it was. Sure, "Tender Is the Night" comes with some beautiful passages and observations on life and people, but it also comes with a bunch of contradicting themes and destinies that all go in different directions.
I get tha 1. I get that the overall storyline is about Nicole's and Dick's marriage but I didn't really care about them. The same goes for pretty much all of the characters except for Rosemary whom I found blossoming and therefore interesting.
Unfortunately, we don't get to hear much about her. I didn't hate this book I did finish it, after all , but I didn't like it much either. It's going to be interesting to see how my last book by Fitzgerald, "This Side of Paradise", is going to go down with me. View 2 comments. Dec 21, Kirk rated it it was amazing Shelves: sentimental-faves. This is a hard but necessary book to read. And yet many friends I share this with just can't get into it. Part of the blame lies with the style: it's just so damned intricate and thick, it tends to scare away those who don't want to be ravished by style.
As someone who does, I can get lost in this book any day of the week. I rere This is a hard but necessary book to read. I reread this for work probably once a year, and I'm always amazed at how fresh it seems to memainly because I'm always discovering a line or phrase that I'd passed over.
It has two fantastic heroines that come to life when they emerge from Dick Diver's point of view: Nicole and Rosemary. There are glamorous excursions from Nice to Paris and Rome. It has that overwhelming sense of abstractionit feels like you're reading history, a socialist critique of excess capitalism check out the chapter on Nicole's shopping spree , a look into the prurience and spectatorship of early filmmaking, a dressing down of romanticism, and a love story about the impossibility of love.
Oh, and its so achingly, gloriously sadI think that's the main reason I consider it a classic. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
Dec 18, Steven Godin rated it it was ok Shelves: fiction , america-canada , classic-fiction. Time is our most valuable commodity. Had enough of this! Two reasons why the two stars, Beautiful sounding title The French Riviera Two reasons that stopped me trowing this out the window in frustration, It's a borrowed book from a rather charming lady Wouldn't want to knock somebody out on the sidewalk, I am on the fourth floor! View all 12 comments. September reread He had lost himself - he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.
This is such a rich, dense and diffuse book that it's hard to do a quick 'what it's about' statement without simplifying and reducing and, in the process, erasing what makes it so marvellous. It is about idealism, especially in relation to l September reread He had lost himself - he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year It is about idealism, especially in relation to love and the consequent disillusion, as so many of FSF's books are.
But it's also about what happens to a good, potentially brilliant, man who makes a wrong choice because of his own vulnerability to beauty and because he wants to be loved - but who ends up selling his soul to an icon of capitalist wealth.
The toxic marriage of the Divers is reflected in that of the comically awful McKiscos, and Dick's gradual slide from bonhomie into full-blown alcoholism is forecast by the fate of his friend, Abe North.
Power shifts within these marriages and it is usually the women who survive - perhaps a marker of FSF's own bitterness? But there are also interesting political narratives: Dick identifies WW1 as a key moment for the death of two empires and the potential emergence of the US as a world power - only the book seems to show the terrible debasement of American cultural potential and is Dick himself a kind of personification of America's destiny?
There are pointed comments on American letters 'McKisco was having a vogue. His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him' - ouch! And Dick himself is essentially bought by the Warrens who see him as an asset to be managed for their maximum benefit ' But because this is FSF, it's never quite this reductive: Nicole, especially, is a shifting character who moves from youthful vulnerability as a response to traumatic abuse, to something much harder and slicker and shows herself adept at wielding the power that is her legacy from her stupendously wealthy Chicago family.
In fact, it's the women in the book - Nicole, Rosemary, Mary North - who are shown to be the survivors, who step up and forward, who abandon their American husbands and lovers for 'foreign' men: French Tommy Barban, the Valentino-alike Italian actor, and the 'Kabyle-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu' Conte di Minghetti who 'was not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of Mason-Dixon' but who displaces Abe North and gives Mary a social cachet and money to rival the Divers.
There is a tremendous focus on acting and performance 'Oh, we're such actors - you and I'; 'She ought to be in the cinema Amidst all this, is a harrowing portrait of a toxic love that still leaves behind an aching melancholy and regret: 'It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other'. Opening on the just-emerging French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver are the perfect couple: beautiful, charming, wealthy and in love.
But the flawless surface hides its secrets well - and beneath the glamour lies something tainted and corrupt This is less tight as a novel than Gatsby, but is more tragic and harrowing. Fitzgerald clearly struggled with the book, attempting to re-order the chronology before he died. In places brutal and savage, this is also desperately sad with a wistful and poignant fragility that is made all the clearer through the parallels with the Fitzgeralds' own lives. Subtle and elusive, this remains for me Fitzgerald's best work.
View all 8 comments. Nov 25, Duane rated it really liked it Shelves: american-classics , reviewed-books , rated-books , guardian
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