描述
◆ 这部小说集里汇集的故事，情节生动、寓意深刻、艺术感强。在这些故事里，美国青年都有着和盖茨比一样的梦想：出身名门名校，娶个漂亮的富家小姐，在上流社会呼风唤雨；如果没能天生拥有这一切，那就扮成社会精英的模样，出入社交舞会，以寻求进入上流社会的机会。再或者干脆加入淘金大军发一笔横财。然而，这些浮华喧闹甚至离奇的故事背后，却透着许多荒谬悲凉之感。
◆ 菲兹杰拉德用他娴熟的文笔，为我们写尽“爵士时代”的纸醉金迷与荒谬虚无。
《爵士时代的故事》（Tales of the Jazz Age）首版于1922年，全书分为三大部分“我最后的风流少女们”“奇幻作品”“未分类的杰作”，共包含11个短篇。这11篇风格迥异的故事主要讲述“一战”后到20世纪初期美国“爵士时代”的生活与年轻人的故事。其中包括布拉德·皮特和凯特·布兰切特主演的奥斯卡提名影片《本杰明·巴顿奇事》原著小说。这本集子里的所有故事都曾登载于《名利场》《芝加哥论坛报》《星期六晚邮报》等知名报刊媒体。
弗朗西斯·司各特·菲兹杰拉德
Francis Scott Fitzgerald，1896-1940
美国20世纪杰出的作家，美国文学“爵士时代”代言人，“迷惘的一代”代表作家之一。
菲兹杰拉德的作品在很大程度上影响了海明威、塞林格的创作。
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This book differs from most others in terms of structure. It takes you forward in time and blurs the periods which separate one depicted scene from another. This Side of Paradise is partly an autobiography that has for a cornerstone the heartache of Fitzgerald himself first with King and then with Zelda. It is no ordinary autobiography however. To be more specific, it is a Bildungsroman which follows the character of Amory Blaine through the experiences of his youth and up to a point of saturation that can be likened to an epiphany. The latter state is reached at the very end when Amory turns against all the values he had previously embraced, and places socialism in their stead in a burst of enlightenment that he himself never predicted or conceived as a possibility. The plot appears at times unfocused and purposeless, and that is because Amory's path towards his final state of self-enlightenment is more of a process filled with trials, mistakes, and errors than a journey towards a fixed purpose. They are episodes experienced step by step in a manner analogous to the lives of each one of us; lives we go through without knowing what stands at the end of the line. Thus Amory's interactions with other characters always end in either him walking away or them leaving him, but not before teaching him something new about himself or about the world in which he dwelt. The restlessness of Amory all throughout the novel can be read as Fitzgerald's reference to the lost generation which Amory depicted as a generation "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” In short, much more than just the outlines of Fitzgerald's autobiography are to be discovered in This Side of Paradise. It all depends on the viewpoint you take in regard to the work.
I feel like this had potential to be a 5, but it was in need of serious editing. It was about 120 pages too long, the dialog was stiff, and the tone was all over the place. That being said, this book was certainly worth the $4 I paid for it. The story of Anthony and Gloria is tragic and said, and it's hard not to see a little bit of Fitzgerald himself in there.