Tender is the night
I had some friends over for a little dinner party on Friday night and had a lovely time of it (except for a few of those moments of trying to keep in mind and manage all the things to do - drinks, change music, spot for the portacot that came with the cutest guest, serve food, oh and speak to guests). With some of these guests (known to the blog world but I shall let them remain anonymous) came a visiting American, in Australia for a conference. He made himself very pleasant and easy company and entertained us with curious facts about America. We came to discussing books, as any good company would ;), and he told me that Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a beautiful story (and his favourite book was The Odyssey by Homer, so I figured there was a chance we were on the same page as to a good book). I've never read any F. Scott Fitzgerald and, well, it sounded quite nicely romantic so thought I'd keep it in mind.
The rest of my weekend was very quiet, so on Sunday afternoon I went wandering up King St, for the thousandth time, just to get out of the house and go and pass people in the street and pretend I was interacting with humanity. Invariably I ended up in the wretched Gould's bookshop, and remembered FSF. There I actually found (very occasionally I manage to find something in that shop) Tender is the Night for $4.95 and then did what you are supposed to do in judging a book and read the first sentence:
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel.
Perfect. No-one called Bjorn or Anastasia, no facile verbiage spilling the sentence into half a paragraph, just the artless pleasant shore and large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. So I bought the book.
It wasn't till I was walking back up the street almost crashing into people that I read the back cover: "A wealthy mental patient, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her psychiatrist ... cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict". 'Oh brilliant!', I thought. That's exactly what I need to balance out the psychological musings of a murderer in Crime and Punishment: a mental health patient falling for a psychiatrist, with a whole maelstrom of conflict.