The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.

Tender Is the Night - Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Does the fact that a book is majestically written mean that it’s one that I should enjoy reading? Not really. While the prose of Scott Fitzgerald flows, as always, beautifully, I spent most of the time wondering why I should give a toss about the Divers and about the sad realities of their lives.

Truth is, I really don’t care about the unhappiness of boring rich American people in the early 20^th century, in particular when this unhappiness manifests itself in Southern France (a place whose magic appeal I never really appreciated – probably because I grew up on the other side of the Alps) and in Switzerland (same as above, except that I can understand why Southern France might be exciting for a lot of people, Switzerland not so much…)