WF141 Bilingual Books: Tender is the Night (Tendre est la nuit)

Friday, 14 February 2020
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Cost: Free for WICE members and €5 for guests

Tender is the Night is F. Scott Fitzgerald's dark account of a man struggling with his wife’s psychological disorder and a lifestyle that eats at his moral values.  
 
He began the semi-autobiographical work in 1925 while living on the Riviera, seeking "something new in form, idea, structure, the model of the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad did not find." It was to be his last complete novel -- one so radically ambitious he hoped it would eclipse The Great Gatsby.
 
When it was published nine years later some critics slammed it as anachronistic; today, it is considered one of the most important novels of 20th-century America.
 
‘This episodic, gorgeously written novel tracks the author’s own decline from the mid-1920s through to the Great Depression, which became an external correlative to Fitzgerald’s own spiritual (as well as financial) bankruptcy.’ Literary Review
 
‘Tendre est la nuit relate l’échec inéluctable d’un couple, et la lente déchéance d’un homme idéaliste et talentueux confronté à sa propre impuissance.’ France Culture

Registration opens Saturday 11 January

You may read the book in your language of choice. Discussions are in both French and English.