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lexorcist 's review for:
This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I so wanted to love this book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my literary idols. The effortless way he drips detail into fluid, poetic prose has dragged me since that one day in eleventh grade English when I scanned the opening lines of The Great Gatsby for the first time. I've been hooked ever since, and have even tried (and failed, and tried again) to capture its essence in my own work.
That easy, languid style is present in this book. That's what made it so sensational, and it's what still has copies flying off shelves and into the hands of eager literature buffs. I appreciate that style, and I appreciate the story that it tells, but the characters just didn't grab me the way I wished they would. I found myself just not caring what happened to them. I was bored by them, and that made me apathetic toward the book as a whole. I wanted to care - I tried to care - but, ultimately, I just couldn't. From a literary standpoint, I can understand how this book boosted Fitzgerald to fame. The prose is absolutely beautiful, and he weaves thoughts and actions in a seamless blend that pull you easily from page to page. He threads themes of love and lust and greed and ambition effortlessly into even the simplest of sentences, and he truly as a talent for building fictional words on the foundations of his world's reality. But personally, I just didn't find myself rooting for Amory or caring much about what happened with his varied courtships.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my literary idols. The effortless way he drips detail into fluid, poetic prose has dragged me since that one day in eleventh grade English when I scanned the opening lines of The Great Gatsby for the first time. I've been hooked ever since, and have even tried (and failed, and tried again) to capture its essence in my own work.
That easy, languid style is present in this book. That's what made it so sensational, and it's what still has copies flying off shelves and into the hands of eager literature buffs. I appreciate that style, and I appreciate the story that it tells, but the characters just didn't grab me the way I wished they would. I found myself just not caring what happened to them. I was bored by them, and that made me apathetic toward the book as a whole. I wanted to care - I tried to care - but, ultimately, I just couldn't. From a literary standpoint, I can understand how this book boosted Fitzgerald to fame. The prose is absolutely beautiful, and he weaves thoughts and actions in a seamless blend that pull you easily from page to page. He threads themes of love and lust and greed and ambition effortlessly into even the simplest of sentences, and he truly as a talent for building fictional words on the foundations of his world's reality. But personally, I just didn't find myself rooting for Amory or caring much about what happened with his varied courtships.