Reviews for Last Tycoon

The average rating for Last Tycoon based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-28 00:00:00 Reed Shusterman �They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.� There are very few writers whose careers you can trace through their work like F. Scott Fitzgerald. The kind of charming immaturity of This Side of Paradise; the polished, profound (if a little thematically evident), career-defining The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night, a decade�s attempt to live up to Gatsby; and, finally, The Last Tycoon, the book that finally would�ve done so. AND FITZGERALD JUST HAD TO GO AND DIE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. I do not know how to review this book. I am completely, truly, one hundred percent sure this would have been Fitzgerald�s greatest. Maybe not his most well-read (Gatsby is perfect for high school underclassmen reading lists - theme-filled AND obvious) but definitely his best. �These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire�I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.� This book, even in its incompleteness, is so subtle and evocative and nuanced. The characters are what Gatsby�s could have been if they were more people than images. Fitzgerald treats his women better, even his minorities better. 1930s Hollywood is as glamorous and seedy and fascinating as one of Gatsby�s parties - and as Fitzgerald himself pointed out, a much needed escape from the war burgeoning as he wrote. �People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.� Reading this is an experience. It�s kind of like if you were assigned a translated book for school, and you read two thirds of the wrong translation before giving it up and Sparknoting the rest. Thorough Sparknoting, but Sparknoting all the same. It�s interesting, and it provides a unique look, but god the whole time I was just wishing that Fitzgerald lived to finish this work. Maybe I�m wrong. Maybe he would have gotten too wrapped up in it - made it too much like Gatsby, rewritten the themes as too obvious, changed the ending or added more motifs. Maybe Kathleen would have gotten the treatment Daisy Buchanan did. Maybe it would have always been way too overshadowed by Gatsby to get any attention. But we�ll never know. And it feels like the worst thing ever that we�ll never get the chance. Bottom line: I loved this so, so, so much. Fitzgerald, man. If only you had another year. �How different it all was from what you'd planned.�

Review # 2 was written on 2008-08-29 00:00:00 Garry kendrick I'm not precisely sure why this book effected me the way it did, but it certainly did. Fitzgerald finished writing the fifth chapter of this book before he had a heart attack and died. When you get to the end of this unfinished novel, you find the last word one of the greatest American writers ever wrote. Something about this is chilling. And despite the fact that one can not make any substantial investment in characters who we know in advance we'll never know completely or whose stories we won't ever realize; there is something in the simplistic and honest quality of this novel that pits it amongst Fitzgerald's greats. He himself said in his notes and letters to friends that he had no fear in writing this novel and that it was to most resemble Gatsby, but in a new way. He wanted to expose things to people in nuanced ways. My version came with the author's original outline and plot synopsis so you can piece together the original intention; but what is really important is what you get: a concise look at the small chances of love in big people. Calamity in the real world. What you get is Fitzgerald's last hurrah; his final statement. What you get, is a novel that could have been, and is enough.