Search Results for: Faith

Last week, I tagged along a couple days on my husband’s work conference to Banff, and then when I returned home I was in a tennis tournament over the weekend so it’s been busy. Being in Banff was really nice as … Continue reading →

Summer days have been busy so I have been away from the blog a bit. I returned from a short trip to California to visit my folks and plunged headfirst into summer chores and activities here. See the photo at … Continue reading →

I’m still coming down from my experience at BookExpo America last week in Chicago. As a newbie to the big publishing event, I was pleasantly overwhelmed by all the books, booths, authors, and book and industry chatter. I attended the … Continue reading →

Hello. Just a quick post as we are still visiting family in Southern California and there’s no time to be on the computer or blog … in this land of milk and honey. I hope everyone had a lovely holiday break and are continuing their festivities with a very happy New Year’s.

Last week I finished F.Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night,” which I was reading with Ti over at Book Chatter. Thanks Ti, I’m glad to make it through this famous book, which was Fitzgerald’s last completed novel and apparently his most autobiographical. Interestingly, Fitzgerald considered the novel to be his greatest work. As he wrote to a friend: “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.”

For those unfamiliar with it, “Tender Is the Night” tells the story of a glamorous American couple living at a villa in the French Riviera in the late 1920s — Dick and Nicole Diver whose marriage over time hits the rocks. Dick is this brilliant guy, a promising psychiatrist who makes the fatal choice of marrying one of his patients; Nicole is beautiful and wealthy but also mentally unstable. She’s left a treatment facility but still has episodes, and Dick is floundering with work and feels trapped by Nicole’s wealth into a lifestyle that is not his own. Into this comes the hot young actress Rosemary Hoyt who is enamored by Dick and whom he can’t resist. Oh sorry day! What once seemed so idyllic and glamorous — Dick and Nicole’s life together (along with their two kids) — turns out to be a recipe for demise.

I wanted to like “Tender Is the Night” as much as Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” but alas, I struggled through parts of it and found it uneven and episodic. There were sections that I thought were brilliantly written and other parts that I found quite tedious. I had trouble getting into and sticking with the story, which starts with an array of expatriates staying and partying at a hotel along the beach.

It’s slow-going at first, but luckily “Tender Is the Night” picked up for me half way through and towards the end as I wanted to find out how Dick and Nicole’s lives would play out — if they would they stay together, or if they would go their separate ways — and what would become of the fling with Rosemary. I needed to see if the characters would find happiness so I stuck with it and plunged further on toward its final dark horizon.

It wasn’t exactly easy reading, but I found the novel quite interesting in how it apparently mirrored Fitzgerald’s own life at the time — with his mentally ill wife Zelda, his troubles with alcohol, and the real-life affair he carried on with a teenage actress. The social milieu the novel describes of the times is also rather fascinating. It includes little details about expats and different nationalities, about rich and poor, blacks, gays, women and children — and marriage. You definitely get a glimpse into Fitzgerald’s 1920’s world and what was going through his mind during the last stages of his life — and I, for one, couldn’t pass that up. He’s too intriguing and talented a figure in literary history to miss reading, even if it’s not my favorite work of his — the story of the Divers is illuminating.

Meanwhile, I listened to Garth Stein’s 2014 novel “A Sudden Light” on audiobook this past week and quite enjoyed it. A multi-generational tale set in the Pacific Northwest, it’s about a 14-year-old-boy (Trevor) who comes to unravel the mysteries of his father’s rich timber baron family when he visits their decaying old mansion — Riddell House — for the first time in the summer of 1990. Trevor accompanies his father who’s supposed to resolve a family dispute over what to do with the large Northwest estate.

Part coming of age tale, part historical logging expose, and part mansion-ghost story, this family drama held my interest till the very end. It has a few twists along the way and an ending that crashes with a crescendo. I guess I liked it just as well as Stein’s prior novel “The Art of Racing in the Rain” and found it more intricate and slightly more interesting than the first in its larger scope. Like “Racing in the Rain,” the narration is easy and lured me in. Kudos to Seth Numrich for a terrific job in his narration of the audiobook.


 “A Sudden Light” is one of those novels you can’t say too much about because it will give it away. Suffice it to say, I liked hanging out with the book’s protagonist, Trevor, who’s a bit of a truth and mystery seeker and is as determined as the boy detective in the series Encyclopedia Brown. By the end, he gets to the heart of the mysteries of his timber baron family and what’s behind the selling of the mansion — and it’s not exactly pretty. Stein is an entertaining author, and I look forward to seeing what he writes next.

What about you — have you read “A Sudden Light” or “Tender Is the Night” and if so, what did you think?

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