The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald

A logical followup to semi-autobiographical This Side of Paradise, which followed its character through adolescence, this novel focuses on the adult life of the handsome and clever - but uninspired - Anthony Patch, who lives it up on his grandfather's dollar and struggles to forge his own way in life. After marrying the beautiful Gloria, his life degenerates until he exists in a state of selfish depravity, evidenced by increasing alcoholism and the alienation of everyone near him. Though it never seems his pinnacle of his life is very high, he manages to fall quite far. Centering on this semi-tragic story, Fitzgerald exposes the strange, separate lives of the leisure class - those who never know true work; whose entire existences seem to be one interwoven political game in which people are pieces and one succeeds only by arranging his or her position and fortifying it, and one's status can be determined by timely usage of a few cynical, pretentious phrases. Not quite as original or spirited as This Side of Paradise, nor as polished as The Great Gatsby, this is nonetheless a rich and honest book, full of the author's typical lyricism and bitter social commentary.

Worth Reading
3 out of 5
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Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

Perhaps one of the most original novels of contemporary literature, Steppenwolf follows the midlife escapades of Harry Haller, a self-proclaimed loner and sedentary intellectual, showing his spiritual collapse and ventures into the vast, unfamiliar world of hedonistic physical pleasure and human interaction. The experimental structure includes a good-sized treatise on the nature of the so-called Steppenwolf (Harry's identity of part man, part lone, wandering, savage beast), and an introduction to the prismatic, fluctuating concept of self and personality found in Eastern philosophy. Hesse conjures up both Goethe and Mozart to take part in Harry's circus-like crisis, and allows other characters to test and push the limits of his understanding (including a criticism of the over-intellectualization of music from a Latino jazz man). This novel, while self-reflexive, fantastical, masculine, personal and German, does not instruct with ideology - it is full of intentional contradictions and alternatives that allow the reader to contemplate the myriad possibilities of life and human experience. I can only imagine its reception in the rising flood of socialist dogma back when it was first published in 1920s Germany.

IMPORTANT!
4 out of 5
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