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A review by benedettal
Babylon Revisited: And Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4.0
Once again prefacing I’m not big on short stories, I still appreciated this collection a lot. Fitzgerald is my favourite writer, so you can see how the two biases would cancel each other out.
The Babylon revisited collection is a very mature and melancholy one. Fitzgerald seems to take inspiration from his own life to write about the struggles of alcoholism, infidelity and loneliness. Written in 1931, this also is very much influenced by the onset of the Great Depression, which permeates all the stories with this sense of latent desperation. The final stories, like the last kiss and life of a writer (or something like that), but also financing finnegan, also seem to be inspired by Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood as a has-been successful writer, and again they feel like a confession, a reflection of his own failure.
It’s a very mature piece of work, devoid of whimsical or hopeful elements. The little tragi-comedies succeed one another and showcase Fitzgerald beautiful prose and talent for characterisation, but the fact that they just end like that really shows how they were sort of just written from necessity. Any of them would have been brilliant if developed as a novel, and perhaps Tender is the Night is the sum of this exercise in introspection. It’s as if at this point, he’s not really interested in writing about huge diamonds or old babies, he just wants to expose his longing for his daughter that he feels he lost due to his mistakes, or how futile his life as a writer feels. I will forever agree with Hemingway that he was wasted on short stories, but this collection is a pretty brilliant one.
The Babylon revisited collection is a very mature and melancholy one. Fitzgerald seems to take inspiration from his own life to write about the struggles of alcoholism, infidelity and loneliness. Written in 1931, this also is very much influenced by the onset of the Great Depression, which permeates all the stories with this sense of latent desperation. The final stories, like the last kiss and life of a writer (or something like that), but also financing finnegan, also seem to be inspired by Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood as a has-been successful writer, and again they feel like a confession, a reflection of his own failure.
It’s a very mature piece of work, devoid of whimsical or hopeful elements. The little tragi-comedies succeed one another and showcase Fitzgerald beautiful prose and talent for characterisation, but the fact that they just end like that really shows how they were sort of just written from necessity. Any of them would have been brilliant if developed as a novel, and perhaps Tender is the Night is the sum of this exercise in introspection. It’s as if at this point, he’s not really interested in writing about huge diamonds or old babies, he just wants to expose his longing for his daughter that he feels he lost due to his mistakes, or how futile his life as a writer feels. I will forever agree with Hemingway that he was wasted on short stories, but this collection is a pretty brilliant one.