Crazy Sunday

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Рассказы Фицджеральда. `Маленькие жемчужины` его творческого наследия. Маленькие шедевры психологической прозы - то нежной и поэтичной, то язвительно-ироничной, то поднимающейся почти до сюрреалистических высот. `Ледяной дворец`, `Волосы Вероники`, `Две вины`, `Последняя красавица Юга` - произведения, которыми можно наслаждаться вновь и вновь. Произведения, которые талант великого писателя вывел из контекста Времени - и сделал достоянием Вечности...

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, American, Romance, Audiobook, Literature

19 pages

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Reviews

[Monika Skopalová · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kniha se mi moc líbila, ale je pravda, že se témata hodně opakovala. Když jsem si mezi jednotnýma povídkama dala přestávku, tak jsem to tolik nevnímala.
3,5*

[Phoenix2 · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Crazy Sunday" is a short story about a series of crazy sundays that lead to a tragic conclusion. I loved the ending, but wasn't that big engaged with the first half of it.

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another pointless Fitz story... oh well. Not my thing. Happy I never read the Great Gasbag (oh, I did read that Mad Magazine issue, didn't I).

[Pavel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obsáhlá sbírka povídek od F.S. Fitzgeralta ukazuje, že psal hodně dokola podobné věci. Většinou tam jsou bohatí nebo alespoň hodně vyšší třída, která řeší své milostné problémy. V lecčem se s tím může ztotožnit i "obyčejný" člověk, například to, jak nečekaně může zamilovanost ochladnout, jak okolnosti mění vztahy apod. Fitzgeralt se vlastně trochu cynicky vysmívá klasickým romantickým příběhům a ukazuje, že není žádné "a žili spolu šťastně až do smrti".

Je tu taky zajímavý aspekt toho, jak tehdejší boháči byly velkými celebritami. Asi bylo ještě málo filmových a hudebních hvězd, takže s penězmi přicházela i taková prestiž, že váš osobní život hned dopodrobna probíraly bulvární noviny. Pro mě to bylo trochu zvláštní a vlastně i otravné v tom, jak hlavní postavy neustále přemýšlí, co na to řekne veřejnost, jako by to byly nějaké hvězdy... Přitom nic extra zajímavého neumí nebo se alespoň se svými schopnostmi v podstatě narodili. Buď se v povídkách vyloženě flákají, anebo jdou pracovat, aby za rok dva shromáždili bohatství - a mohli se zase flákat...

Výjimkou v této sbírce je povídka o Benjmaninu Buttonovi, což je zde taková krátká vtipná záležitost - žádné velkolepé drama jako ve filmové adaptaci. Pak je ještě správně šílená povídka o jednom mega-boháči, kde jeho jmění přesahuje představitelnost většiny smrtelníků a momentálně má obří obydlí s rodinkou na nezmapovaném území kdesi v horách, které úzkostlivě tají a nebojí se přitom i zabíjet. To mi trochu připomínalo až Chucka Palahniuka, i když tahle povídka není zdaleka tak promyšlená a logická.

Celkově zajímavý pohled na dílo tohoto amerického spisovatele, i když to není úplně můj šálek čaje.

Pět zamilovaných milionářů z deseti.

[Alisha Brook · Rating 2 out of 5]

Title: Crazy Sunday
Series: -
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Classics
Rating: 1.5 stars

After a streak of some pretty decent Fitzgerald works it was bound to happen that I'd be disappointed once again by one.

This one is very dull and seems incomplete. I didn't find the main character, Joel Coles, to be an appealing or relatable character at all, in fact, I despised his character. The ONLY thing that kept me reading was the character of Stella Calman (Stella Walker, of course), who was bright and a breath of fresh air in terms of available characters to bond with.

Quite frankly, this was a very unfulfilling read.

[Liam James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this one was a let down. It started strong though, let me tell you! So Joel is a screenwriter and he seems relatively well-adjusted, at least in comparison to other Fitzgerald protagonists. He likes to drink of course, but he's got it down to a science—he doesn't drink on Sundays as he's responsible and shows up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Mondays. Good for him. Well, one particular Sunday he receives an invitation to his boss'—some hotshot Hollywood director—party and it throws him in a tizzy man! Oh heavens, he promises himself he'll be polite and funny and won't so much as touch a drop when Stella smiles up at him and sh*t hits the fan. For she grabs him a drink as they're chatting and you're saying, "Yup, this is gonna be great!" And Fitzy doesn't fail. Not at all. For, at the end of the party, after several humorous discussions with Keogh (can't recall his first name) but he's clearly a drunk as he has a manager ration out his money for him so he won't gamble it all... But I digress, Joel makes an absolute fool of himself at the end of the party, trying to put on some skit he wrote using Stella as a prop or supporting lady or something. But her smile remains so sweet and the narrator says a gem of a line, I wish I could remember, something like, "but he wouldn't ever say how sorry he was till he no longer felt that emotion?" Something like that, but it was gold trust me. The whole scene; you just felt those beady eyes upon him as he performed. And the boss actually booed! Ha! When was the last time you heard someone actually boo? And it was foreshadowed perfectly; something like, oh, I'll botch it all up and I'm too lazy to look, some distance hesitant feeling he got. Anyway, you may say, "Well Liam, it sounds like you loved it. Why the low score for ol' Fitzy?" All I can say is it went south from there. Joel falls in love with Stella—how could he not; the way she smiled at him when he was so low, I'd marry her myself man—then he gets mixed up in her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, Joel's boss, the beady-eyed jeerer. Then, I don't know; I don't even remember, it was so boring! Stella tells him of her husband's weird ways—apparently his libido dies as soon as he marries, so Stella's out of luck whenever she's feeling frisky. But who cares at this point, right? I'm sticking with tears and two stars. If I'm nodding off, not caring about the end, then that's what you get my friend. But you're still the best, Fitzy.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of Fitzgerald's this story was ok, but as a fan of 1930s Hollywood it haunts me. The story goes that Crazy Sunday was based on a party at Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg's house where Fitzgerald drunkenly embarrassed himself and was poured into a cab (this action takes place early in the story). There are other discernible elements of truth throughout the story; the telegram from Stella reading something along the lines of "you were the most agreeable person at our tea" which closely resembles an actual telegram Shearer sent him after a party, his discomfort in the presence of the sideshow performers from the "circus picture" (Fitzgerald apparently threw up on the set of Freaks (1932), which Irving Thalberg produced), and references to Miles/Thalberg's ill health (Thalberg suffered from a congenital heart defect). Miles's sudden death at the end of the story is chilling considering Thalberg did die young leaving Shearer a widow, but not until four years after this story was published.

Here's the beauty I see in this story as someone who spends far too much time reading internet articles about both Fitzgerald and the people he is fictionalizing: First it challenges me to identify as many truthful elements as I can in the story, then it forces me to consider how much truth there is to the more sensational parts, then it makes me question how much truth there is to anything I've ever read about these people. I think of the scene in the beginning of the story where Joel and Stella (Fitzgerald and Shearer) observe the careful posturing of the guests at the Hollywood party.

And yes, for the rest of my life I will wonder what exactly happened between him and Norma.

[Howard Eisman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main hook in this story is that it has fictitious versions of Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer in a difficult marriage. This apparently was not the case in the couple's real life. Thus, the story fails as hollywood gossip. Otherwise, the point of the story is blunted. The narrator/protagonist doesn't seem very real. He appears to be a cardboard version of Fitzgerald himself (who had his own hollywood misadventures before writing this.) The story lacks impact because its three characters don't register as being more than stereotypes.

Fitzgerald gives us his well crafted sentences and pithy observations. They don't flow as naturally as in his better works. Sometimes they seem forced, like putting in more spices than a recipe requires because the dish is so bland.

[Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like the story. It is beautifully written and Fitzgerald is a stylist par excellence. It is perfectly, or near perfectly structured as well. There are no flesh and blood, compelling characters, though, and the Hollywood posturing is too much and too star-signifying. The adolescent in Fitzgerald comes alive to haunt him in "Crazy Sunday" and his fantasy of a being partly alienated artist among beautiful celebrities kills the story. The irony is, of course, that he was the partly alienated artist but he was a sad, lonely person as well, and because there isn't enough consciousness about that, the story has no emotional life. Too bad, because Fitzgerald's great intellectual and poetic gifts come to naught here.

[Kent Mickelson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think this story hit the emotional beats it intended. It’s disjointed and kind of bounces along from scene to scene without much of a coherent throughline. Joel’s career as a screenwriter is forefront at the beginning and discarded by the end; its only seeming purpose was to introduce Joel to Stella. Although a lot of it regards Fitzgerald’s own experiences, I think he was going in too many directions at once.

[SluggishGoblinReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joel is in love with Stella who is married to a cheating husband who is trying to better himself with therapy.

Every Sunday he attends some party to see Ester again and she talks about her dissatisfaction but devotion to her husband Miles.

Story depicts Joel’s own feelings of loneliness and alienation while living in Hollywood.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of Hollywood, actors, socialites and alcohol. Miles is the central figure with his wife Stella and friend Joel.

Mike’s drinks too much, a topic Fitzgerald returns to a lot.

A sudden twist is at the end of the story.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[anemoska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story is sooo crazy as hell.

[Yasmin M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this with two very dear people. Had a fun night learning about Joel and his mind.

[Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best American Shorts of the Century (Audio Book)

[marstin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adoro estas minis histórias

[Luca Muresan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this. Felt like a noir romance movie from old Hollywood.

[Abby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lesson learned … just have the threesome it will save lives

[Jan Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was dull and seemed like a first chapter of a book and not a short story.

[Viji (Bookish endeavors) · Rating 3 out of 5]

An above-average read. Joel's character seemed a bit shady and dull. Stella was simply spectacular in everything-dramatic as she always seems. I loved her attempt to keep the feeling of her husband alive,the way in which she did it. Miles' touch of magic is revealed in his death in the statement by Joel,"What a hell of a hole he leaves in this damn wilderness- already!" Till the end,we feel that Joel is the centerpiece of this story but in the end,it is revealed that it is really Miles' story. Not a bad storyline and Fitzgerald's style of writing makes it touchy enough.

[Daisy]

Stella and Mike are Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg

[Eliška · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ve světě je mnoho druhů lásky, ale nikdy ne táž láska dvakrát.”
Fitzgerald je ❤️

[Shona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sounded alot like Elizabeth Taylor's life prediction.