I had forgotten how depressing F. Scott can be, and I think more than usual in this book. Talk about a tragic ending! ( )

Whenever F. Scott Fitzgerald is mentioned the first thing that comes to mind is "The Great Gatsby". Fitzgerald only published 5 full length novels and one of them was not released until after his untimely death at the age of 44. "Tender is the Night" was the last novel published while he was still living. At the time he was struggling with serious personal problems: alcohol abuse, financial debt, and his beautiful socialite wife Zelda was in and out of mental hospitals suffering from schizophrenia. The glamorous lifestyle F. Scott and Zelda lived during the 1920’s was falling apart, and so was their marriage. "Tender is the Night" mirrors the pain, confusion, frustration and dissatisfaction in F. Scott’s life.

Told in three parts "Tender is the Night" begins on the beach at the French Riviera, a playground for the idle rich during the late 1920’s. Part 1 is seen through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, a young beautiful American actress on vacation. Her first day on the beach she meets the perfect couple, Nicole and Dr. Dick Diver, charming hosts to an intimate group of friends. From the moment Rosemary meets the Divers she is attracted to Dick, and much to Nicole’s dismay he draws Rosemary into their clique. Rosemary is dewy fresh, lighthearted and enthusiastic. In contrast, Nicole is disciplined, refined, and socially reserved. An affair seems inevitable. Towards summer’s end, filled with self assurance and in total command, Dick says, “I want to throw a really bad party….where there is a brawl and seductions and people go home with their feelings hurt and women pass out…..” It is no surprise that Part 1 ends with drama, scandal, and disarray.

Part 2 drops back to 1917, and tells in-depth story of Nicole and Dick Diver’s romance and marriage. Highlighting particular events of the early years of the Diver’s relationship, the story weaves its way back to the present.

Many Fitzgerald fans were dissatisfied with the sequence of Part 1 and Part 2, but I found it ingenious. It allows the reader to initially see the Diver’s from an unbiased objective point of view as Rosemary saw them. As in "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald liked to reserve an element of surprise; as the reader eventually learned of Gatsby’s true character, they also experience the shock of finding out that Nicole and Dick are not the perfect couple. In the conclusive Part 3 Dick and Nicole’s relationship spirals out of control as the Divers struggle to find themselves and deal with their tumultuous lifestyle and troubled marriage. "Tender is the Night" does not quite live up to the standard of "The Great Gatsby", but it certainly has intriguing characters and a very powerful plot. ( )

We break ourselves against one another; shattering our spirits against the unyielding hardness, the unforgiving and jagged defenses which protect our loved ones’ spirits. It is a necessary and all too familiar part of life. Sometimes the collision chokes a relationship, killing it before it can grow, and other times, it nurtures a bond until it flowers and sustains life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was filled with such collisions, most notably his marriage to Zelda. Zelda’s fragile and oft broken psyche and the strained love between her and Fitzgerald clearly inspired him to write [Tender is the Night]. The novel follows the Divers, Dick and Nicole. Dick, a psychiatrist, falls in love with a patient, Nicole and begins a life altering obsession to cure her. During one of Nicole’s interludes of sanity, the couple meets Rosemary, a self-obsessed, narcissistic teenage actress. She tempts Dick and they have a brief love affair. Dick’s betrayal forever alters his love of Nicole, as she becomes increasingly paranoid and distrustful and he wallows in guilt and weakness.

The book’s story is not particularly engaging, as these spoiled and selfish people seem to randomly careen around, bumping into each other. But on several occasions, Fitzgerald’s pain and anguish over his wife’s malady and their tenuous bond to each other bleed through the rest of the story and characters, quickening the novel. I can’t say I enjoyed reading [Tender as the Night], though it certainly seized me in the occasional moment of raw emotion and pain. Fitzgerald wasn’t always telling a good story but often transposed powerful feelings, ones which must have afflicted him, into the book. And most every page offers graceful, harmonic language. Often, I turned off the processes in my mind with sort through story and plot and character to simply absorb the rich, powerful prose.

Bottom Line: A classic for two reasons: the way Fitzgerald can string words together and the glimpse it offers into lives cursed by madness.

4 bones!!!! ( )

I have to say I was very disappointed with this book. After reading The Great Gatsby I was eager to read more of F. Scott Fitzgeralds work so I thought I would read the one that took him the longest to write. I could honestly tell that he struggled to write this book. He was all over the place and it didn't even seem like a story. It took me a much longer time to read this than I had anticipated, but I was determined to finish it. The only good thing about this book is it does let you know a little bit about his life with Zelda, but he should have just written an autobiography instead of changing a few things and try to pass it off as fiction. I will read all of his other books anyway, but I really don't think Tender is the Night was worth the time. ( )

Read this last month and found I kept postponing the moment I had to review it because I didn't know what to write about it. Let me start by saying that there are two editions of Tender Is the Night: the book was originally published as a narrative with a non-linear sequence of events, but an edition issued after Fitzgerald's death was restructured - based on the writer's own notes - so that the events are recounted in the order in which they happen. The one I read was the latter. I don't know whether it is because of this re-arranging of events in a chronological order that I found the first third-or-so of the book particularly tiresome. The plot wasn't going anywhere, the characters were not particularly engaging at best - downright dull at worst - and I was particularly annoyed with Fitzgerald's writing style. I felt that he kept hinting at some life-altering truth beneath his words but he just won't get it out in the open and be done with it. He kept tantalizing the reader: overanalyzing, it seemed, the surface of the matter when he could have gotten to its rotten core in no time.

Having decided I will not give up on the novel yet, I persevered until it started to grow on me. Not in the sense of some sort of love or emotional bond being born, but in the sense of a delicate, deeper sense of appreciation. Having finished the book and looking back on it...I never did get to love the Divers. But had I given up on it halfway through I would still think, for example, that Dick Diver is a boring stereotype. Now I know him to be none other than Dick Diver: ambitious psychiatrist, drunkard, troublemaker, self-obsessed, disturbed, pitiable, enviable, talented, kind, mean, manipulative, money-loving, selfless, caring, insightful - and a hundred other things at once. I know Nicole to be Nicole and Rosemary to be Rosemary. And I do feel I'm a slightly better person for having gotten to know them; for experiencing the complex relationships, the subtle characterizations, the conflicting feelings, the underlying melancholy of the book. I still don't love any of the characters; but wouldn't dream of saying they are dull. I still don't like Fitzgerald's writing style; but wouldn't dream of saying it is bad. I'm still not sure I like this book; but wouldn't dream of saying I wish I hadn't read it. ( )

I've tried to tackle this text twice now - once with the audiobook and once with the text itself - and could not make it more than halfway through before giving up. The classic Fitzgerald lifestyle and characters that are so enthralling and rich in The Great Gatsby fall flat here, and the story is so belabored with thick prose that it was tedious trying to make some forward progress. I was hoping for more. ( )

.This novel explores the disintegration of a young American psychiatrist, Dick Diver. He’s bright, aspiring, idealistic, but makes the fatal mistake of falling for a patient, Nicole, and then marrying her. While he has a very positive effect on her mental health, he becomes the rock on which she is balanced, and he loses himself in the process. As she ascends he descends.
Overall, a disappointment. The structure is odd. It seems to start in the middle, and this reduced my prospects of identifying with Dick - or caring about his disintegration. At times the prose is obscure and over dramatic. I think perhaps Fitzgerald wrestled too long with this book and lost his way. He wanted to write another mighty book; he tried a variety of characters and structures and in the end the result is a somewhat scattered and incoherent novel. ( )

I gave this book a solid try - I really did. It's been on my shelf for ages, and I've never seemed to get past the first ten pages or so. This time, I really endeavored through, only to find that not one of the characters was compelling enough to make me want to see what happened to them. The style, while highly praised to me, just grated on my nerves after several pages and I found myself hesitant to read on.

Ultimately, even the ending isn't satisfying as the 'main character' ends up in ruin while other characters had a standard, uneventful existence at the end. ( )

I debated rating this book higher and it may well deserve to rate higher as once I got through the first third of the book, I found it quite engaging. However, the first part of the book, I found the story and characters off putting enough to put it down and not touch again for a year. It may well be that high school English teahers were haunting me with their whispers of finding themes and symbols in a story that I was looking so hard for deeper meaning in every word that I was missing the story. I couldn't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. I must admit though, that once I did pick up the book again I found myself quickly involved with the story and caring about characters that I had previouly dismissed as unlikable.
In the end I am glad I picked up this book once again and gave it a second chance. ( )

An amazing book - the sense of dissipation is really quite palpable. Fitzgerald seems able to somehow create real to life characters with just a few strokes.

I'm having a hard time coming up with exactly what I want to say about the book except that it was really fantastic. There were some flaws certainly, and at times the stylized writing style (is that redundant?) made it difficult to decipher exactly what was going on in the scene. Also, the scene that ends the first part - with Rosemary discovering the dead man, it just didn't feel right to me.

For me the book fits neatly into other works that I've read recently. The French beaches and hotels remind me a great deal of Proust's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" - though the writing and impressions are remarkably different. The Swiss sanitarium also reminds me of Mann's "The Magic Mountain." These 3 books were published within 10-15 years of each other, yet they are remarkably different. I've just tried to "rate" them, but there is no way to do that except my own enjoyment of them which is fairly superficial. "Tender is the Night" is by far the easiest to read and most conventional of the three, but any other rating would not be worthwhile. ( )

For me, this was a disappointment for Fitzgerald; the story is a little scattered and the characters do not interest me or seize my investment the way I'm accustomed to his characters doing. ( )

Beautifully depressing. Fitzgerald depicts a psychiatrist's attempt to improve his schizophrenic wife's life at the destruction of his own . The book conjured up a variety of emotions for me as I began to identify with all of the characters. I soon found myself wondering which characters I was for and which I was against. Every character was tragically real and loveable in their own way. It is a really great book that is reminiscent of Fitzgerald's own marriage to Zelda. I am amazed that Fitzerald was able to detach himself from the story enough to provide this kind of depth and understanding of all of the the characters. ( )

Fitzgerald's beautifully written analysis of an American married couple whose life gives way under external and internal pressure while abroad. Drawn largely on his own crumbling marriage to the schizophrenic Zelda this is another of the Fitzgerald novels I could do with re-reading.

Not the most cohesive of Fitzgerald's work, Tender is the Night does deliver on Fitzgerald's beautiful prose and heartbreaking characterizations. The novel explores the disintegration of a promising young American doctor whose idealism comes under the crushing weight of hard capitalistic power. At times it becomes difficult to believe in the main character's steady decline since early in the novel he is depicted as so brilliant and thoughtful. However, Fitzgerald tries (and generally succeeds) in making the argument that American idealism is a fragile thing and not impervious to the destructive power of money. ( )

In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes--about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism. Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad.

In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined--professionally, emotionally, and spiritually--by his union with Nicole. Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later--not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." (Amazon.com)

After finishing this book I was reminded of a beautiful grand house - if you take it in its entirety, you can't help but admire it. Within, there may be some rooms that leave something to be desired, but the overall effect is breathtaking. So it is with this book. Fitzgerald manages to write a story about a relationship that manages to be acerbic and tender at the same time. Like the other traditional inheritor of the `Great American Novelist' title, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald combines a genius for writing wonderful character insights with great `background painting' - some of his descriptions of settings are truly masterpieces. Even the `extras' - they don't have anything to do with the story so it is hard to call them characters - get wonderfully drawn descriptions. I feel that this book truly captures its age and place.

And the added bonus - this is a wonderful insight into a relationship built on the worst of foundations slowly but surely heading to its end, told to us from various viewpoints. I don't know much about Fitzgerald's life, but if this is semi-autobiographical as literary critics say, you have to feel sorry for all that were involved in the real life events. Dick and Nicole are really caricatures of the Americans of their generation that lived the high life in Europe, and yet could never quite put their finger on what is was that they were actually meant to be doing. ( )

Dr. Driver met his wife at the mental facility he worked at. Her condition seemed to fluxuate. The children were raised by nannies and spent a lot of time with mother & father when they took up traveling.

Not an easy read - there is a lot of pain in this book, no doubt based on Fitzgerald's own experiences with his wife Zelda, who suffered from schizophrenia. It is a beautiful, touching, truthful book. I couldn't put it down. ( )

I don't even try to comment on why Fitzgerald's writing is so great. There is so much essence about human interaction, so much vivid imagery, so many nuances captured in concise ideas. Tender is the Night was the book that introduced me to Fitzgerald's genius. Examples I found clever: the description of the psychiatrist listening and nodding as if he were Sherlock Holmes, anticipating "a valet, and only a valet," that any man only has one or two ideas really, and the comparison of France "where everyone thinks he's Napoleon" vs. Italy where "everyone think's he's Christ." ( )

Read in Krasnodar. Lurid account of the twisted love lives of the wealthy and famous. Starting with a lolitaesque pedophile relationship. Falsehood lies etc

The first line of this book is one of my favourite first lines in a novel and always draws me right in to the French Riviera, the setting for the first part of the story.
Nicole Diver as a character appeals to me more than anyone else in the book, although I do have a fondness for Abe North as well.
The story starts with the introduction of Rosemary, a young film starlet, to a group of friends on a beach. She is immediately drawn to Dick Diver, the husband of Nicole, but he does not seem to have more than a polite interest in her at first. Rosemary is drawn into their circle and it becomes aware that the group are not quite as perfect as they appear.
However, this isn't Rosemary's story, it's Dick and Nicole's and the second part of the book deals with their meeting, marriage, states of mind, relationships with others and Dick's decline as Nicole seems to ascend.
Some of the other reviews say that this story isn't as accessable as The Great Gatsby but I have found this to be more easily readable and haven't actually been able to finish Gatsby but have read Tender is the Night about five times, so I'd say to anyone that they should give it a try. ( )

While not as accessible as The Great Gatsby, this somewhat autobiographical novel is just as beautifully written and intensely felt. It shines the same subtly bleak light on a life that seems glamorous, showing in striking detail, without sentametality or banal description, the hidden lives of a family that seems to lead an ideal life. ( )

I have never read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald that I did not like. Where "The Great Gatsby" is a diamond, bright and hard and clear, "Tender Is the Night" is a pearl, round and soft and luminous. It is especially interesting to read this book before and after reading a biography of Fitzgerald or his troubled wife. It also helps to have a smattering of French and Italian, because there are no footnotes in this edition. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in great American literature, the expatriate circle between the world wars, or mental illness. Even if you are not interested in any of the above, it is still a wonderful book. ( )

I found this book disturbing in what it revealed about the author's mindset. A misogynist and a racist from what I could tell. A bully. The era he was living in is no excuse: read Edith Wharton to see that it's not necessary to have those attitudes. I also found it surprisingly badly written; it was difficult to read and didn't flow, and I often found it difficult to know exactly what the author was alluding to, or more bluntly, what had just happened in the story. Perhaps it was his attempt to be arty, more likely there were assumptions about what his contemporary readership would understand. To me this just makes it dated. I was hoping to have found a new (old) author to explore but I won't bother. I am now interested in reading some feminist analysis of his relationship with his real life wife. Was she also sexually abused by her father I wonder or did he make that up, or take it from another person's life? ( )

I liked this story. Even though it was a wrought with life's difficulties, its trials and tribulations, it was very engaging. However I couldn't understand why it would be on anyones banned or controversial books list. ( )