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Tender Is the Night

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Tender Is the Night

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Narrated by: Therese Plummer
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About this listen

Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year. "It's amazing how excellent much of it is," Ernest Hemingway said to Maxwell Perkins. "I will say now," John O'Hara wrote Fitzgerald, "Tender Is the Night is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side of Paradise." And Archibald MacLeish exclaimed: "Great God, Scott...You are a fine writer. Believe it - not me." Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character - lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative - Tender Is the Night, Mabel Dodge Luhan remarked, raised F. Scott Fitzgerald to the heights of a "modern Orpheus".

©1933, Charles Scribner's Sons (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Classics Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage Romance

Critic Reviews

"Plummer's skill with varied voices and accents is without equal. She navigates Fitzgerald's glamorous world with panache, immersing the listener in the intense characters' personalities. The result is an entertaining production in which the narrative is as alive as the characters themselves." ( AudioFile)
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This story was okay. As a fan of “the great Gatsby,” I was hoping this would be an enjoyable book as well. However I found it to be a bit slow and dull at times. Although it’s a rich in symbolism and the themes, the story itself isn’t that entertaining.
The performance was okay but some parts were too dramatised. At one point, the reader imitates a scream which is quite startling.

Overall, not the best but not the worst.

A bit dull

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Tender is the Night is far darker than The Great Gatsby, because we are neither chaperoned by an outside narrator, nor spared the internal view of the dissolution. It is also less compressed with a looser structure, so that little is left out.

The reading is superb. This book has a lot of dialogue with several characters, and it cannot work unless both genders sound natural. I did not immediately appreciate how good the reading is, because part of what makes it so excellent is the consistency

Dark and troubling classic of American writing

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I liked the story, but got really annoyed by the reading. A bit less exaggeration and exclamation would have been good. I would probably have given four stars if I had read it myself.

Good story, not so good performance!

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to be honest, it was a bit boring
it was well read by the narrator though

a bit boring

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This was my first experience with F Scott Fitzgerald - I really didn't enjoy the story or his style of writing. The plot was rambling and too incoherent. I liked none of the characters.

Not my taste

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