Reading 1001 discussion

I read this in 2009 and never reviewed it. I remember liking it (better that Gatsby) but it isn't an uplifting story. Semi-autobiographical, it is the story of a doomed marriage. Set in the 20s, the couple are traveling in Europe and appear to be quite sophisticated and worldly. Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalized in 1932 with schizophrenia. The author found himself in his darkest time when writing this book which he considered his greatest novel. The title is taken from the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats.

3 stars. Read in 2017

Fitzgerald has a love for languages and vocabulary. I found his writing easy to read. I think this story was the disintegration of a marriage. I am glad I read the book.

read June 2021

I found this a chore to read. That’s not to say there wasn’t some beautiful writing in this novel, but there were issues with flow and portions of the story that seemed dropped in haphazardly. It’s a very sad story, and the parallels to his (Fitzgerald’s) own life make it even more so. I was pleasantly surprised that Nicole had a happy ending, but not surprised at Dick’s ending. While I was reading this novel, I felt that Fitzgerald’s alcoholism had really affected his craft (in the inability to string the story together coherently) which makes me sad and angry for the squandering of such talent. 3*

I read in a review somewhere that this book did not sell well when first published and that Fitzgerald attempted to go back into it and make it more chronologically coherent. However, I found the structure of the book to be perfect for me to emotionally grasp what the couple looked like from the outside in the eyes of the smitten Rosemary Hoyt, in the eyes of a group of sophisticated expats, and in the eyes of Dr. Divers colleagues at his hospital in Switzerland. The flip over to the eyes of Dr. Divers himself and then his wife made the book a true tragedy rather than a simple telling about the disintegration of a marriage. As Dr. Divers falls into depression and a particularly ugly drinking problem, his great love, his wife finally comes out of her psychological illness and become truly her own person. Dr. Diver's only success in life, after showing almost endless potential, was his allowing her to leave him.
Very powerful book to me and yes, Fitzgerald was himself disintegrating due to economic problems brought on by his wife's mental illness and his own alcoholism. This book was not fine tuned by a master craftsman, rather it was a captured by someone who was himself failing.

Pre-2017 review:

*** 1/2

Up front, I will say that I like this much more than The Great Gatsby; it felt not necessarily more "believable", but more tangible. Further, I liked the way in which he broke the chronology of the story and the different points of view, you could truly feel the story being turned down at a pivotal point, so much so that it changed my point of view about the characters. The setting and the psychiatric themes reminded me a lot of the Anais Nin journals written at about the same era.

Compared to Gatsby, a more psychological exploration of masculinity, and not because the main character is a shrink (because actually he seems to have relatively little personal insight). But there is a lot about mental illness here and the desperate ways that men and women try to relate to each other and heal each other and how miserably we can fail both our partners and ourselves. The writing is masterful, evocative, the life frenetic, and ultimately so lonely.

And the title is not about tenderness between people, but the tenderness of being able to escape at night, in dreams, in poetry, in literature, from the cares of being human. From Keates:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
- stanza 3 and 4 from Ode to a Nightingale