tender is the night

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Close to the end of this book, I got very very sad. It wasn't really a tearing-up kind of sadness. It was a more moving sadness about loneliness, love, age, powerlessness, about loss and failure; but not any of these things by themselves. And then, when I finished reading the book, I did something I haven't done in a long time. I flipped it and started over. I started to read it again, watching for depth where earlier I only read with curiosity.

I fell in love with this book about at the same point at which everyone in the book fell in love with the Divers: at their party on the terrace. But the moments leading up to it, the flirting so to speak, was exquisite. The passage about Nicole in her garden, for instance:

"Along the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten."

And then, the party reached its climax: there were fireflies by the cliff, and the table they were sitting at seemed to have risen towards the sky like a mechanical dancing platform.

There's so many little things that I love about this book.

"Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?"  

It's such a beautiful line. Used in so many ways. Used for so many things. Used for one thing, most of all. Rosemary. The first time I came across it, I giggled a little. It is the first time Dick imagines Rosemary with someone else:

"Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

- Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

- Please do. It's too light in here."

(Although my favorite usage is where he says it at the end of a chapter. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?)

It's very difficult to try and write about a book that is considered a classic. People have read in so many ways that I can't even count, and they've been doing it for the better part of a century. I feel really out of my depth, even trying. The last time I felt like this about something I fell in love with was when I watched Rear Window and Birds. Even before I could think about something to say about it, I was bombarded with hundreds of exciting people saying exciting things about Hitchcock. (I googled Tender is the Night and one of the first things I came across was "Metaphysics of Style and Tender is the Night." Really?!)

I know this is a very fractured post that isn't really saying anything but that's the way I feel about this book right now. I'm very moved, and I really don't know how to talk about it.

Anyway, I'm a bit obsessed with this book and Fitzgerald for the moment. There's that.