Fitzgerald was an unknown name to me when I picked this random book in a bookshop. Owing to the name and the cheap price, the book persevered to the cashier and thence to my library. I read the book with a rather speculative interest. Having finished Ghosh's disappointing work I had picked up Hesse's "Steppenwolf". But the book seemed too beyond my age for appreciation. So a few pages down the man-wolf's life, I swapped it for "This Side Of Paradise".
Fitzgerald was rather young when this work of his was put into print. Inspiring is his story as is his book impressive. "This Side Of Paradise" was his first novel with bits and pieces written in between wartime skirmishes and parts constructed in romantic depressions. The eloquence is rather abrupt. But it was the story that gripped my interest and rather haunted me.
The novel plots the life of a certain Amory Blaine from his childhood to his youth and ends at a mere age of twenty-three (Fitzgerald's own age at the time) in an abstract that was, in a frail sense, disappointing for me. Amory Blaine is shown as a 'romantic egoist' who considers himself in a league above others. His life in Princeton and the ongoing evolution in him is described. His ambitions; his loss of ambitions; his romantic ventures; his poetic heartbreaks; his occupational disasters and more form the story line while his reactions to all these situations and his view on certain issues grease it. The story told is the story of the generation of the Americans lost in the tempest of the Great War. The story is a simply a story; without a plot lying in the ulterior recesses. It simply tells of the mental growth of a boy to a man, a 'personage'.
The sequence of events created an uneasy interest for the book in me. The story seemed to progress much like my own (hence the disappointment at its premature end). Albeit I found the thoughts described in the book disagreeable most of the time, there were a few cases where I could understand and symapthise with Amory's point of view. All this gave a rather pleasant flavour to the story.
Fitzgerald certainly thrilled. But I believe it was more due to the story than his way of writing. Though there was nothing wrong with his style, there was nothing dazzling about it either. This book being a rather random assortment of writings rather than a single fluent work, I will delay my opinion on Fitzgerald as an author till I happen to read another of his work.
