The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western

There doesn't really seem to be a point to writing a review of the working draft of an unfinished novel. While it has a plot, there is no way of knowing how closely it hews to what the final story would have been. It is also apparent that this is a working draft; many of the Episodes are more sketch than scene and the transitions are often less than smooth. There's also the abrupt end. Fitzgerald's appended notes are interesting but don't provide a clear picture of what the final novel would have been.

If only Fitzgerald had lived to finish this book. The voice is more mature than his early work, and the topic more along the lines of Tender is the Night than The Great Gatsby. Worth reading as a glimpse into an artist at work.

I read this book just after moving. It helped conceal my own inchoate sense of things. It bothered me, kidding myself, I thought about what the novel might had been. That wasn't the issue, then.

Unfinished and clearly still working towards where it would ultimately land, but still incredibly crisp and evocative.

The author's last book, and a very incomplete one at that. One can see some fragments of the genius that wrote Gatsby, but there isn't very much left here to admire. Fame destroys.

Very much a pre-final draft but there are some flashes of beautiful writing.

3.5

El libro lo leí hace muuuuuucho, pero hace unos días volví a mirar la película por tercera vez y....

No estoy segura pero me gusta mucho más la adaptación que la historia original.

Me pregunto por qué será...



...algo superior en el film...



Sé que había algo...



...Que me gustaba más en la peli...



...que el libro estaba bastante bueno.... Pero la peli tenía un nosequé más-mejor....






Ahhhhh, si! EL.

(Juro que lo amo y en este personaje, todavía más)

Literary detective Bruccoli has produced a remarkable feat of scholarship in this welcome critical edition of the novel Fitzgerald began during his final year (1940) while working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Generally considered a roman a clef, the story charts the power struggle of self-made, overworked producer Monroe Stahr (modeled on MGM producer Irving Thalberg) with rival executive Pat Brady (a stand-in for MGM head Louis B. Mayer). It is also the story of Stahr's love affair with young widow Kathleen Moore and is (partly at least) narrated by Cecelia, Brady's cynical daughter who is hopelessly in love with Stahr. After Fitzgerald's death in December, his conflicting drafts for the novel were reworked by Edmund Wilson, who show more spliced episodes, moved around scenes and altered words and punctuation. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald biographer and editor of Cambridge's critical edition of The Great Gatsby , has restored Fitzgerald's original version and has also restored the narrative's ostensible working title, one that implies that Hollywood is the last American frontier where immigrants and their progeny remake themselves. Equally significant are other entries in this volume: Bruccoli's informative introduction; letters by Fitzgerald, Wilson and Maxwell Perkins; facsimiles of Fitzgerald's notes and drafts; and textual commentary, including helpful explanations of the novel's numerous topical references.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. (Publishers Weekly) show less