An Athenian among Greeks

I saw a trailer of the upcoming Great Gatsby movie the other day, an adaptation of a book I particularly loved. It contained a great shot of New York during the 1920's. When I spent an extraordinary week in the city last year, I noticed how the Jazz age was all over the place (especially on 5th ave.).

No one described the Roaring 20's and the café society more elegant than F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the world of the Belles-lettres the author is (to put it in his own words)
"an Athenian among Greeks", no doubters there!

As luck would have it, I had just finished one of his novels before going to NYC: The Beautiful  & Damned

The novel is all about the relationship of Adam Patch and his wife Gloria. The classical themes of Fitzgerald are present: heavy drinking, the East coast jet set, World War I and the lost generation. 

The love story is a tempestuous and melancholical one, resembling the author's relationship with his wife Zelda (picture below). It's witty, elegant, moving and amply deserves a couple of hours of your life. 

Quote: 

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty - and of her body, close to him, slender and cool.