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This Side of Paradise |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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In this famous book of the "Lost Generation", Amory Blaine is a rich and attractive young man who attends Princeton. Once he graduates, however, he tries but fails to find for himself a niche in the rest of the world. He meets and falls in love with a few women, but is rejected, or rejects himself. All told, it is a well-written, captivating story of a young man searching to find himself in the tumult of a changing world. Highly recommended. "Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself to the devil--not go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself and rather addicted to Oriental scents)--delivered from success and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all, only to the artificial lake of death."
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