Attain F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tales Of The Jazz Age (The Cambridge Edition Of The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald) Depicted By F. Scott Fitzgerald Conveyed As Booklet
can conclude, having finished this collection of short stories, that with the exception of The Great Gatsby, F, Scott Fitzgerald is just not really for me, This collection was saved, in my opinion, by The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Porcelain and Pink, and Jemina the Mountain Girl, Barring some moments of subtle but shocking endings, I found the rest of the stories dull, and the characters empty, and the prose ineffective, Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, published shortly after his second novel The Beautiful and Damned,
Book : Tales of the Jazz Age includes a few of the best stories by F, Scott Fitzgeraldand several that achieve nothing more than being briefly entertaining "Porcelain and Pink" and beautifully written, By this time
magazines would publish anything he wrote, so Fitzgerald was scraping the barrel he needed the money digging up old sketches from college, absurdist ramblings, imaginary plays, sixpage enigmas, anything else he could find and all were published.
His daughter, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, observed that not all of them were worth keeping as "they are 'pieces' rather than stories proper, " Some are more clever than brilliant "Tarquin of Cheapside", but the oddities are fun and demonstrate his range few would guess that all of these were written by our Chronicler of the Roaring Twenties a century ago.
He was interested in experimenting, breaking the mold, and could be absurdly silly as some sort of protoBeckett, But amidst the others are high points of Fitzgerald's short story career, "May Day" is a serious he calls it "unpleasant" and nuanced take on social and political issues of the day, In "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" my favorite Fitzgerald demonstrates that the rich really are quite different than the rest of us, willing to calmly countenance slavery, fratricide, and serial killing to preserve their wealth.
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a fanciful tour de force, is both more sentimental and more effective than I expected, It's also a distantly relatedfilm with Brad Pitt, These three works belong in any selection of his stories, Fitzgerald's secret weapon is his unique empathy, an ability to get inside the minds and emotions of any of his characters, and take us along with him.
½ Πρόκειται για μια συλλογή εποχής με τις πρώτες ιστορίες του, χωρισμένες σε θεματικά κεφάλαια. Πάντα συνδεδεμένος με τον πλούτο και την υπαρξιακή ανησυχία, με καυστικό χιούμορ και χρυσά κορίτσια. Some lives just ring empty like empty crocks And F, Scott Fitzgerald was a great scholar of human emptiness And his stories, despite their wickedness, boast an atmosphere of merry fairytales,
In The JellyBean life is a precarious gamble of chance:
With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
A wall had sprung up suddenly around him hedging him in, a wall as definite and tangible as the white wall of his bare room,
In The Camels Back life is a funny masquerade:
“Perry,” said the bad man softly when the roadster drew up beside him at the curb, “Ive got six quarts of the doggonedest still champagne you ever tasted.
A third of its yours, Perry, if youll come upstairs and help Martin Macy and me drink it, ”
“Baily,” said Perry tensely, “Ill drink your champagne, Ill drink every drop of it, I dont care if it kills me, ”
“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently, “They dont put wood alcohol in champagne, This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old, Its so ancient that the cork is petrified, ”
In May Day life is a senseless riot:
Peter suddenly reached over to a plate on the table beside him and picking up a handful of hash tossed it into the air.
It descended as a languid parabola in snowflake effect on the heads of those nearby,
In Porcelain and Pink life is a series of taking a bath, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are a lot of fantastic happenings,
In Tarquin of Cheapside life is nothing but a pleasure of reading:
“He read at wine, he read in bed,
He read aloud, had he the breath,
His every thought was with the dead,
And so he read himself to death.
”
In Oh Russet Witch! life is a waste of potentials:
And she had been drinking, The threefold flush in her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine cosmetic that he could tell, She was making great amusement for the young man on her left and the portly person on her right, and even for the old fellow opposite her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation.
In The Lees of Happiness, Mr, Icky and Jemina life is throes of vanity and all that jazz:
Here was the gayety of the period the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners.
In life emptiness tends to assume many guises, ”Non possiamo permettere che un fatto inevitabile come la morte cimpedisca di godere della vita finché possiamo”
"Il diamante grosso come lhotel Ritz"
Raccolta che comprende undici componimenti introdotti dallautore stesso con una piccola nota esplicativa suddivisi in tre sezioni:
Le mie ultime maschiette con quattro produzioni giovanili.
Uno narrazione scorrevole, a mio avviso anche troppo,
Quello che mi sembra abbia maggiore valore in questi racconti è il contesto storico,
Siamo nel primo dopoguerra: gli Stati Uniti escono vittoriosi da un conflitto che seppure geograficamente lontano ha coinvolto e sconvolto le vite degli americani,
Ora, però, si vuole solo voltare pagina:
questa nuova generazione intende chiudere il sipario sui campi di battaglie e le lugubri scenografie,
Si tuffano a capofitto nella bella vita anche se questo termine felliniano sarà inerente al secondo dopoguerra è utile per far capire latmosfera,
Unattenzione alla cura dellabbigliamento e allaspetto estetico,
Una profusione di feste, di balli a cui si deve partecipare: ballare è una prerogativa per essere popolare,
Il Jazz impazza. IL popolo bianco balla e si diverte sulle note di una musica che nasce dai neri ancora relegati ad un sistema di segregazione,
UnAmerica bianca, giovane e spensierata che emette la sua condanna nei confronti di chi non tiene il passo, chi socialmente non brilla,
Di questo quattro racconti quello che ho trovato degno di nota è in assoluto “Primo Maggio” un racconto dove leuforia festaiola non fa altro che mettere in risalto il dramma di uno dei protagonisti.
Fantasie comprende altri quattro racconti,
Sono le creazioni preferite dallautore stesso e tra le quali spicca “Lo strano caso di Benjamin Button”,
Lultima parte comprende i capolavori non classificati dove mi ha colpito “I sedimenti della felicità”,
Una raccolta disomogenea per generi ed umori che spaziano dal reale al fantastico ma, a mio avviso, anche per qualità in unepoca in cui i racconti si vendevano bene e, insomma si lavorava un po a cottimo:
”Credo che tra tutti i racconti che ho scritto questo sia quello che mi è costato meno fatica e mi abbia divertito di più.
Lho scritto in un giorno a New Orleans, con il preciso scopo di comprarmi un orologio da polso in platino e diamanti che costava seicento dollari, Lho cominciato alle sette di mattina e lho finito alle due di notte, !
La parte posteriore del cammello
Over the lastminutes I must have switched betweenandabouttimes but I did really like most of the short stories.
Fitzgerald has a way of creating the not always endearing but nevertheless interesting characters in his short stories that are sadly missing in his novels The Great Gatsby excepted.
Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, includes at least two masterpieces"May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, " This edition reproduces Tales of the Jazz Age in full, along with several uncollected stories from the earlys, including "Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar," which closely anticipates the themes and characters of The Great Gatsby.
James L. W. West III traces the textual history of the stories, and provides detailed historical notes and references, I loved this collection of eleven short stories by local lad F, Scott Fitzgerald well, he spent part of his childhood in St, Paul and attended high school at St, Paul Academy where I played Sunday basketball for close toyears so we roamed the same hallways and gymnasiums!, My only complaint is that theWalking Lion Press edition I own contained many spelling errors, I was really surprised by this, How did these errors get past proofreading! I've forgiven Walking Lion Press, though, as I admire the book cover which features a mesmerizing painting of Edith Bradin from May Day.
Not only are the stories excellent, so is the table of contents which includes a paragraph or two about the origins of each story, Great stuff. Fitzgerald divides the collection in to three parts: "My Last Flappers", "Fantasies", and "Unclassified Masterpieces", I'm not big on fantasy but the stories were all so well written and well told that there was no drop off in interest for me, I rarely give short story collections five but am going to for Tales of the Jazz Age as I really enjoyed all the stories and some were just fantastic.
My favorites of the bunch were:
May Day: an episodic tale set on May Day some time after WWI, Sad and unpleasant, this was hard to forget, Would make a great movie, One of the best short stories I've read in a long time,
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: I think everyone knows of this odd fantasy story it was made in to a film indirected by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
I really liked the film as well,
The Camel's Back: a hilarious lost love story centered around a costume party and a twoperson camel costume,
Ratings for each story:
The JellyBean
The Camel's Back
May Day
Porcelain and Pink
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Tarquin of Cheapside
"O Russet Witch!
The Lees of Happiness
Icky
Jemina, the Mountain Girl While I have loved Fitzgerald's novels at least, back when I read them, I can't say I actually enjoyed this collection of stories.
While Fitzgerald was obviously an engaging writer, the stories here feel like him coasting along, There are completely trivial pieces that he wrote as an undergraduate and are of the quality you'd expect from an undergrad, pieces that he wrote for the money literally, he admits in the forward that one was written so he could buy, IIRC, a watch, and experimental pieces that, in my opinion, don't work Tarquin of Cheapside, for example.
The collection feels like it was pulled together from whatever he had lying about, to cash in on the reputation that his novels had built, I don't think I'd classify anything here as even remotely essential Fitzgerald, .