Reviews for Sophus K. Winther

The average rating for Sophus K. Winther based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-21 00:00:00 Roxann Gregg Wow! Where to begin? Let's start with Scott. I personally never cared much for the writers of the Lost Generation. The two biggest luminaries - who hated each other - were Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was misogyny and ego on steroids (the closest he ever got to being a human as an author was "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," which is actually one of my favorite books of all time) in general. Fitzgerald's writing always struck me as the thinking and perceptions of a wannabe (he never was comfortable in his own skin and was jealous of everyone and everything else). It turns out that Scott's writing reflected exactly that and I didn't somehow miss its genius. He was jealous of everybody around him, and his wife, Zelda, it seems the most. Scott was a raging alcoholic. As such he was a liar (at best, he told his version of truth, but it was never really the truth, just stories he spun to put him in the best light and make everyone else, including Zelda, the problem), he was a manipulator, he was mean, he was destructive, he was controlling, and he was the world's biggest jerk. He destroyed Zelda piece by piece, and because I saw the reflection of every alcoholic I've ever known in everything he did and said, it hit home and hit hard for me. It made me angry and sad for Zelda. And it made me intensely dislike Scott (I hated his behavior, probably even more intensely because I've seen it up close and personally and I hate it when I have to deal with it - there is no defense and so I empathize with what Zelda went through). Zelda was no angel and her choices and lack of good guidance from her parents contributed to the mess her life with Scott became. But she was intelligent - much more so than Scott - and she was strong, which he was not. She had insights, even in the depths of madness, that Scott simply wasn't capable of because he was more like Jay Gatsby - a pretender - than he would have ever admitted to being. And she had a genetic predisposition to madness. I don't think she was ever diagnosed properly and she was subjected to the barbaric psychiatric treatments of the 1930's and 1940's, and those took most of what made Zelda Zelda, including her memory, away. Zelda was Scott's muse, and he liberally - and without her knowledge or permission - used her diaries, letters, and life (often lifting entire sections of her writing and using them unedited) to create the lead female characters in his novels. But when Zelda dared to express a desire to write herself, the alcoholic jealousy, rage, manipulation, and destructiveness that so characterized Scott's interaction with everybody, but especially Zelda, went into overdrive and Scott broke - intentionally - Zelda for good. This is an incredibly objective, but sometimes gut-wrenching, look at the life of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their family and friends. It's not a happy ending for either one of them, and there's a lot of unhappiness all around their circle. It's not a feel-good book in any sense of the word, but it is well worth reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-14 00:00:00 Keith Beckett Taylor's biography of the mythical Fitzgerald couple is a fascinating read - although probably a biased one, and certainly not the last word on two extraordinary figures. The huge work she has undertaken (most of all, researches of all kinds that gives her book a spectacular scope) is admirable, and it helps in bringing vividly to life, from beginning to end, the tumultuous relationship of Scott and Zelda. Here are two complex persons that, for better and for worse, have become emblematic of their era, and Taylor does a great job in showing us what really was behind the myth - and what she shows is often tragic, pathetic, and heartbreaking. She obviously has a bias against Scott, and sometimes she lets that overtake her objectivity, but it's pretty clear that the writer was as destructive to himself as he was to his wife. Zelda comes out of this book as a poignant character, a fragile, extravagant, talented, original, flawed beauty, a bird desperate to fly but unable to to spread her wings. The pages about her illness are and fall from grace are infinitely sad, but Scott's demise is more sordid. Taylor makes some little mistakes (for example about Jean Harlow), misspells some names, fills sometimes pages with unnecessary information (we don't need the whole biographies of all the doctors that Zelda encountered), and she's also prone to repetitions, but still, her achievement is quite notable, and her book is a brilliant introduction to a doomed couple whose tortured love affair remains devastatingly incandescent.