Jesse’s Reviews > The Beautiful and Damned > Status Update
Jesse
is 17% done
ngl, in my head this had always been “The Beautiful and THE Damned”. I am less partial to Anthony’s character as we don’t get the depth of background that exists in This Side of Paradise, but both characters were dominated by a loathing of the “ugly”. I do recognize that this again autobiographical novel is based on his courtship and marriage to Zelda, so it’s interesting here as well.
— 17 hours, 1 min ago
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Jesse
is 50% done
Anthony and Gloria falling in love and getting married is only a small portion of the story. Fitzgerald at this point gets into the crux of two people finding out how to live with each other, with squabbles and fights and sweetness. Some of the fights are petty, and some of them betray a masculine menace that Anthony embodies when he is tired of deferring to the mercurial Gloria’s whims (and also drunk).
— 10 hours, 2 min ago
Jesse
is 33% done
A lot of this book is profoundly psychological insights into Anthony’s thought process in wooing women and being completely taken aback by Gloria’s refusal to adhere to the pathways in which he has tread. At this point the diary that Gloria reads through is one of my favorite sections, but of course it is liberally selected from (and without permission) the one Zelda actually kept…
— 14 hours, 21 min ago
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16 hours, 54 min ago
there is something in Fitzgerald that typifies a “youth” mindset. the only thing worth being is young—and rich. This Side of Paradise also explores what it means to have been young and rich but then no longer rich, this being the downfall of his engagement to Rosalind, patterned after Zelda’s initial rejection. for that I am grateful to the arc of TSoP. I am open to being shown whatever Anthony and Gloria’s track is but while I was young I have been too overweight virtually my entire life to ever consider myself beautiful, so there is a certain bitterness in my heart in watching these escapades that I have yet to successfully quash.
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