Book Review: The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book Review: The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The most striking thing about The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald's ability to manage the character development arc so eloquently and systematically throughout this process.

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

a beautiful novel. Apparently, he is moving away where he publishes his first book, This Side of Paradise, and follows a young man, Anthony Patch, who, just from Harvard, enters a world where he decides to stay in his spare time, and so slowly deteriorates due to lack of purpose. It is said to be the story of Fitzgerald himself and his wife, Zelda, but there are glaring discrepancies, Fitzgerald's most obvious literary and financial success.
A young couple marries and, rather frantically, waits for his rich grandfather to die and leave a legitimate legacy:

The justification for his lifestyle was, first and foremost, the meaning of life. Like the aides and ministers of this great Han, the pages and the squirrels, butchers and pilgrims, a thousand books shone on his shelves, and there was his apartment and all the money that was to be had when the old man in the river had to choke on his last morality.

A young couple is idle and traveling aimlessly waiting and bored with each other and themselves ...

He closed the door and paused for a moment when he returned to the room, still holding the tennis ball in his hand. one of his loners came, one of those times he walked the streets or sat, aimlessly and depressed, biting his pencil at his desk. It was self-absorption without any comfort, a demand for expression without sales, a sense of time rushing past, relentless and wasted - just because of the belief that nothing was wasted, because all of his efforts and achievements were equally worthless.

Middle age is coming too fast and they keep waiting. Anthony is trying to do some work under the direction of everyone around him, but he lacks any ambition or inner strength ...

By the late twenties ... the routine disappears as a twilight in the harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too delicate, too varied; values   change completely with each breach of vitality; it started to seem like we couldn't learn from the past what to face in the future - so we stop being impulsive, persuasive men who are interested in what is ethically a true difference, .

Inevitably, the spiral of alcoholism, infidelity and financial collapse is falling. Grief infects a beautiful wife who is aging gracefully but confidently, and finally life has missed them both ...

For a moment, though contradictory warnings and desires prompted Anthony, it seemed like one of those rare times he would take a step he was encouraged from within. I hesitated. Then a wave of fatigue came before him. It was late - it was so late.

Morality is obvious, but it applies to every generation, no matter how lost. Fitzgerald's speech sounds in this historical document of the Jazz Age. Beautiful.

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