Beyond the Letters

Nina Simone, Mr. Bojangles and all that jazz I started the review with this song because even if you are not a jazz fan you absolutely have to listen to it before you read the book (and preferably while you are doing it and immediately after you’ve finished). Otherwise you won’t be able to fully appreciate the atmosphere. This tiny novel is simply jazz age reborn, and if you have ever read Fitzgerald you certainly have an idea of how it feels to read Bourdeaut. Jazz music  can be found in every corner of this story, the characters listen to it, dance to it, and live according to the ways of jazz age – drinking, having fun, enjoying their lives while they can, even though the world around them is breaking into pieces. This book is about escapism, about sacrificing reality to happiness and common sense to feelings. When you open the first page, you immediately meet  the narrator – a nameless boy of an uncertain age . What may seem indifference to the character in fact ser...

Having read all the novels of Fitzgerald I can officially say that this novel is my favourite. Yes that is true, many professional literary critics consider it to be the most immature and imperfect work of Fitzgerald, but still I like it and nothing will change my opinion. This novel is a story of Amory Blaine. Or of Scott Fitzgerald? Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the author and the main characters for there are so many events and people taken from the writer's life - Princeton, military service in Europe and the Triangle Literary Club as well as Monsignor Darcy, Beatrice Blaine and Clara who are almost accurate copies of Fitzgerald's closest people. However we can't say that Fitzgerald and Amory Blaine are one and the same person. Amory is a collective image of many young people of the time including Fitzgerald himself. So who is this Amory Blaine? Let us see. he author himself labels him as "The Romantic Egotist". That is not quite tru...