Hoarding
We dropped by the annual Cut-Price Book Sale at the nearest National Bookstore. As usual we weren’t looking for anything and we ended up buying something.
This was too good to pass up:
A Taschen book featuring works by Caravaggio, Claesz, Dürer, Arcimboldo and others. Beautiful full-color plates. Original price P735 (which is low for a hardcover art book), sale price P441.
What can you buy for P20 bucks these days?
The Penguin Classics edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night, arguably his finest novel. Haven’t read this book since high school; time to re-read it and get all the stuff that zipped right by me.
How about a Tender Is The Night Readers’ Support Group? While we’re waiting for A Dangerous Method, which according to the trailer is about Carl Jung’s affair with a beautiful patient, we can read Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about a young psychiatrist who marries a beautiful patient. It was adapted for film in 1962 (We haven’t seen it).
Rumor has it that Tender In The Night will be adapted for film again, with Matt Damon and Keira Knightley in the lead roles. (Told you Keira is excellent at playing neurotics.)
If you don’t have hard copy, you can get read it online.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
August 3rd, 2011 at 12:34
and i just bought fitzgerald’s “this side of paradise” and thoreau’s “walden” at fully booked last sunday. at regular price! i should really start checking out these bargain book sales.
August 3rd, 2011 at 16:24
I was supposed to buy only two books last weekend with the NBS gift certificates a friend from NZ sent me for my birthday. With the sale at NBS Glorietta, I was able to spend the P500 GC (plus P34 cash, I think) on four books plus a Mead pad and a pen. I still have gift certificates left on my next trip to the bookstore. Yipeee!
August 3rd, 2011 at 17:32
thanks for the link! i already started reading it online for lack of stuff to do in the office.
and what a timely setting! i myself am moving to the south of france come september.
August 4th, 2011 at 11:27
I bought this compilation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complete novels (including the last unfinished one) which was sold in the garbage (almost) bin of Cubao Expo + the maroon edition of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Will start to read The Tender is the Night shortly.
August 4th, 2011 at 16:14
i’m now on chapter 12, and i’m starting to find the characters a bit too overbearing and cliché-ish. and it’s making me feel like i’m watching a tiresome lazy afternoon soap opera on GMA or ABS-CBN while reading it.
is F. Scott Fitzgerald gay? his style of writing is a bit too girly for me. and that manner of inserting random french words out of nowhere, reminds me a bit of this article i saw on PDI written by Maurice Arcache claiming Toulouse to be in the “southeast” of France: http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=26736
the french people would consider that “blasphemous !!!” and “sacrilegious !!!” (both with three exclamation points), if they ever come across this article.
now, i’ve read The Great Gatsby when i was a teenager. and just a couple of years ago, i was listening to it in an audiobook while on the plane. and i don’t remember complaining about it like right now.
i think this book is better “seen” than “read”. either that, or i’m just plain lazier now when it comes to reading… but now, i’m obliged to read it to the end because i’ve already started… so i still might change my mind about everything i said here… save for the PDI article and the blasphemy bit.
August 5th, 2011 at 01:55
roseriver: Yes TITN is mannered and too schmaltzy for 21st century sensibilities. It’s easy to see why Gatsby is the candidate for The Great American Novel and not this one. I’m reading TITN in the context of Fitzgerald’s life—his marriage to Zelda who had to be committed (She died when the asylum burned down), his burnout from all the hack jobs he took on, alcoholism, and his feeling of never having lived up to his potential (like Dick Diver). As for the French words I think they remind us that the Divers don’t really belong in France, no matter what French expressions they use (total opposite of M. Arcache’s intentions I suspect). Then again I am a fan of Fitzgerald’s so my interest is partly anthropological.
If the book annoys you, STOP. Here, I think you would like this better: The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. http://www.online-literature.com/wharton/custom-of-the-country/ Set partly in France, starring rapacious social climber.
August 5th, 2011 at 11:10
thank you v. much for the recommendation!
i was reading about the Edith Wharton book you recommended on Wikipedia, and it pretty much sounds like a soap opera also, but i’ll give it a try, just because i totally loved reading and watching The Age of Innocence.
but first, i must finish Tender is the Night. perhaps, i may have been too brash with my judgment, having only read a few chapters of the book.
bon weekend, Ms. Zafra! :)