| 
A Key West Bed and Breakfast....
Boasting an incomparable location at the midpoint of Duval Street, The Tropical Inn is a quiet and private island compound. You might walk down Key West's most famous promenade a hundred times and not notice this romantic hideaway, tucked unassumingly away just steps from all the bustle and excitement |
|
|
| This Side of Paradise (Modern Library Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Creator: Susan Orlean
Publisher: Modern Library
Category: Book
List Price: $5.95
Buy Used: $3.75
You Save: $2.20 (37%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  96 reviews
Sales Rank: 814695
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 3.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0345481224
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780345481221
ASIN: 0345481224
Publication Date: May 31, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
from the master of poetic prose May 22, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
As much as I would love to give F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel five stars, the fact that it is a mere shadow of "The Great Gatsby" (my all time favorite novel) holds me back.
It amazes me to think that he wrote this when he was only twenty-three years old, and yet the vanity and arrogance expressed by Amory Blaine and his generation is suggestive of youth and the ideas of invincibility.
Without doubt this is a smartly written, witty novel yet also highly indicative of how truth and experience are blindsided by youth, beauty, and the hauteur of the newly educated. Perhaps the best aspect of the novel, for me as a diehard Fitzgerald fan, is his signature of wonderfully poetic prose. There is something about the way he crafts a sentence that allows for every sense to be involved. You can not only hear and see what he says, but smell and touch it as well. Despite the intellectualism involved in his writings, it is his poetic honesty that speaks to me on a visceral level. He is simply a genius in this respect. In reading this work, one can only consider "The Great Gatsby" as a natural progression of the privileged wealth and leisure demonstrated here. And on another note, there is also a great deal of recognizable autobiography going on in the text which adds to the authenticity of the story.
And lastly, this is the book that "sealed" the marriage between F. Scott and Zelda...perhaps the most tragically romantic marriage to date, at least in my opinion.
And with this, I will leave you with a quote from the book:
"While the rain drizzled on, Amory looked futiley back at the stream of his life, all its glittering and dirty shallows. To begin with, he was still afraid--not physically afraid anymore, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet deep in his bitter heart he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly--'No. Genius!'"
review for class May 16, 2006
0 out of 14 found this review helpful
It all begins on 1924. We have many characters which caught great attention to my eye.Let me start out by saying how much I liked this novel. It really caught my attention because it seems that Fitzgerald transported gatsby to the south of France. Dick Diver is a talented psychiatrist that has invited everyone to his mansion. "I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and a seduction and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette."Sounds just like Gatsby.
We don't know Dicks' story yet and are left to make a judgement to what it was. The party all include many people, but of all there are three that are very significant. This whole idea that there'e to the novel is very confusing at times. Even though I may have liked the book alot, I think it's not directed to the audience I stand in. Fitzgerald compounded the book with many words that were unfamiliar to my understanding. Which required alot of searching in order to comprehend the novel. There's even some French in this novel. So if you're looking for a challenge and to enrich your vocab this would be a good book. Moving off that subject i need to state thate this novel is written in three different perspectives. Such that it's diveded in three books. It was a first to me, and i kind of liked that style. Moving back to subject, I would not recommend this book to others just because of the time it took to read it. I know it's a great book and all but many of my peers like to stick with t.v. Thereof its not one of my recomendation if you don,t like to read.Overall i give it a four out of five.
P.s This book left alot of unanswered questions. Some like Who is the victim Dick or Nicole? Will either Nicole or Dick find happiness? See if you can figure them out.
 Paradise Found (This Side of Paradise) May 14, 2006
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
An extremely enjoyable read. Fitzgerald writes about what he knew best, himself. There is no such thing as a poorly written F Scott Fitzgerald novel or short story. His body of writing is all excellent. The book is basically a fictionalized autobiography of his early years, with the names changed. Paradise goes into Scott's formative years, his wonderful mother, his early romances, money problems, adventures in writing, and the private schools he attended. It then goes into his Princeton years, his joining the army towards the end of WW1 never having graduated, and of course the meeting and courting of Zelda. His youthful years are wonderfully revisited in the 'Basil Stories'. In his later years Fitzgerald's popularity virtually disappeared, and to contrast Paradise 'The Pat Hobby Stories' has him abasing himself horribly and quite humorously as a washed up hack hollywood script writer who can't write. Of course the Hobby stories prove that he could still write excellent prose
 A mess, and not a very agreeable one-- and yet... April 22, 2006
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
What is remarkable about this onetime best-selling book -- which could well be described as a coming-of-age-without-coming-of-age novel -- is not that Fitzgerald produced it when he was all of 24. Nope, the amazing thing here is that the same writer produced "The Great Gatsby" a mere five years later.
"This Side of Paradise" is a mess: it is as uneven, affected, feebly pretentious and relentlessly immature as its hero, the tiresomely self-conscious young Minnesotan-gone-to-Princeton Amory Blaine. (One suspects, in fact, that had Fitzgerald abandoned his muddled third-person narrative altogether and rendered the work instead as Amory's diary the result would have been considerably more readable -- or the book's structural and methodological flaws considerably more forgivable, at least.)
That the novel was a roaring success upon publication in 1920 -- it was to prove the most popular book, in terms of sales, ever produced by its author -- presumably speaks to the public's recognition of something new and revealing in it. Okay, Amory Blaine may well have been the original Jazz Age prototype; and the drinking and shameless smooching (etc.) that he and his prep school and Princeton friends indulge in at various points in the novel were probably, one can accept, a revelation to see in print (and likely a titillating one) for an American audience raised on McGuffy's Readers -- and ready for some sort of Great Departure after the Great War. Welp, here it comes:
"On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon, the `petting party.'
None of the Victorian mothers-and most of the mothers were Victorian-had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed."
To the reader at a remove of some 80-plus years this is, of course, very small beer. What was alarming frankness in 1920 tends to read now, in the best cases of the Paradise narrative, as unalarming quaintness. While this is not exactly Fitzgerald's "fault", so to speak, it is also true that the use of "shocking revelations" of this type -- scandals specific to a place and time -- represents a risk a writer takes: the march of history may or may not reveal something lasting and/or universal in such episodes. In any event, the price the reader pays here, in slogging through the meandering narrative which surrounds Amory's adventures in quaintness during the nascent Roaring Twenties, is very, very high for payoffs of such modest proportions. I mean, come on:
"For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he also lost the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes."
Yikes. I don't care what New Generation you're talking about, can a flake-pounded soul really represent much of an innovation to anybody? (Can it represent ANYTHING to anybody?)
There are things to like, even admire, here and there in Paradise. Fitzgerald gets off a few of the wonderfully epigrammatic lines that were to become a trademark (e.g., "They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered." "Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy." "It's better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.") And the political incorrectness of some of the narrator's observations is, in its now-curious way, refreshingly, bracingly funny:
"Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed [which is about all Amory ever does-MHT], war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basketball markings. When Amory went to Washington the next weekend, he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens-Greeks, he guessed, or Russians."
Nothing like a little wretched refuse to remind you there's a war on, I always say.
Anyway, most of the novel consists of young Amory's elaborate ponderings -- romantic, philosophical and egotistical -- which are as forgivable as they are forgettable. I've forgotten them already. At some level, in any case, Fitzgerald himself had to recognize the ridiculousness of this pompous character -- who was, of course, a not-very-disguised version of himself. For how else, if not as commendably self-deprecating irony, are we to take this observation?
"Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his mother not to expect him, and sat in the train and thought about himself for thirty-six hours."
In the end, in any event, one comes back to the initial Fitzgerald vs. Fitzgerald comparison with something like gaping wonder. In Paradise almost nothing works: form, content, narrative stance, dialogue, character development, pacing -- you name it, it's a problem. Yet in Gatsby, five years later, everything works -- everything. If there is to be a Great American Novel, it will have to supplant Gatsby for the honor. While it is hard to see how Fitzgerald got from point A to point B, the fact is that he did -- and without point A the journey could not have begun. So while "This Side of Paradise" hardly deserves a place in the national literary canon, it surely deserves our respect, and indeed our gratitude, for what it led to.
His First Popular Novel: Outstanding Prose March 31, 2006
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
Fitzgerald is considered to be an important early 20th century American writer. I bought and read Fitzgerald's five major novels (the present, "The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon") plus one book of short stories plus the biography "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur" by Matthew Bruccoli.
Fitzgerald wrote about half a dozen novels and over 100 short stories - the short stories were done largely to make money to support his life style - plus he worked on a number of Hollywood film scripts. He died poor in Hollywood in 1940, leaving an insurance policy as his main asset.
There is a tremendous variation in his writing. The first two novels have good prose, and the present book is better than his second novel "The Beautiful and the Damned." This present book is probably his best work, but with so much variation in his work, you can also make a case for "Tender is the Night" as being the best.
The book is the story of a young wealthy student, Amory Blaine. The book is divided into two parts: "The Romantic Egotist" and "The Education of a Personage." Blaine attends Princeton in Part I. The second parts of the novel covers his experiences after university. Many thought that the book scandalized the life of a Princeton student, and it was controversial and popular in its day. Fitzgerald cites many other authors in the book and it descibes the culture of the times in New York and Princeton. The novel - with the beautiful prose, the interesting story, and the references to the 1910-20s culture - propelled Fitzgerald to instant fame.
The following is an example of the prose in Part I, Chapter 2, and it speaks for itself. The setting is Princeton University.
"Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade them good night.
The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful. He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one of Booth Tarkington's amusements: standing in mid-campus in the small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the sentiment of their moods.
Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted, white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads thrown back:
Going back going back,
Goingback to Nas-sau Hall,
Going back going back
To the Best Old Place of All.
Going back going back,
From all this earth-lyball,
We'll clear the track as we go back
Going back to Nas-sau Hall!"
Here we have excellent writing, beautiful prose, and an example of a great American novel. It is the type of novel where the reader stops to admire and re-read some of the prose.
|
|
|
Powered by Our Keywest | |
