This Side of Paradise — The Book You Will Read Over and Over Again
Why can’t I stop relating to Amory Blaine? I consider myself a much kinder, more open, more ethical soul than he was. Then why do I see in himself a reflection of my own, not-yet fulfilled and not quite soothed adolescent worries? Perhaps it is just that — Fitzgerlad has painted an ageless portrait, a glimpse into the soul of an intellectual young man that is meant to endure.
The book scarcely has a plot. But despite it, it remains one of the most profound works ever written. It is a tome of unfathomable depths that I have yet to fully understand, even after having read it multiple times. It is stunning how a mind so young could produce a work so philosophical, yet so exquisitely beautiful at the same time. Especially, considering that he published it when he was only 24.
There is something ardently seductive about the eloquence of F. Scott’s language, the poeticism, which is so deeply ingrained in the time he represented and a never-repeated upbringing he was subject to. It tackles the primordial concepts of young love, destructive heartbreak, lust for money, fame, power and the reconciliation of oneself with the image of themselves they envisioned in the haze of youth.
What truly strikes me as irreplicable in this novel is its utter lack of originality in terms of the internal struggles of the main character, which co-exist with the exalted thought that helped define an entire generation, an entire age. It was this book that inspired the great scholars of a later time to speculate on the inner worlds of those who fought in the first all-consuming war, believing they knew those men, who now lay silently in mass graves, or those who drunks themselves to death from grief of what they had seen. But it is also this book that granted an illusory understanding to the scholastic minds of what had set up the outrageous spending and ridiculous glamour of the upcoming years.
It is through this novel that the contemporary romantic can glimpse into the distraught mind of a would-be and a have-been soldier, still guided to the war by the duty of a long-passed time of valor and glory. It was in this book that culminates the true disillusionment of apex empires that spun the world and of people whose ideas cardinally differed from the thought that shape the modern world. It was in this book that the soul of a young man is expressed to its very naked carcass, stripped away of all vanity in the search for meaning and yet, despite all its melancholy nihilism, is left with a distant promise of relief.
I know I am not the stupidest of men. I am proud of possessing an education and a capacity for self-education that rivals that of some of the greater names of history, but even I know that it will take me many more times re-reading it in order to get to the bottom of the ideas that Fitzgerald planted. Whenever I read it anew, avenues of thought previously invisible to my eye blossom from the ground like the blazing trails of fireworks, formerly concealed from my immature mind.
F. Scott is one of my favorite authors and the one I revere the most not only because of his literary style which I so biasedly consider to be the best there is and the best there could be, but because to him I owe a great debt. The debt of seeing myself for who I am in the mirror of his exposed persona — who I am, who I wish to be, and who I should never become. The dark abysm towards which I have sometimes tipped over in my revelry, pursuit of greatness, power, and in plain juvenile stupidity.
I think This Side of Paradise is a must-read for anyone who is struggling to find themselves, who is in the process of finding themselves, or who believes they have found the wrong version of themselves.
You can also read my reviews of other books by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
