Customer Reviews

Save Me the Waltz

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Save Me the Waltz is a book worth reading. Although rather wordy and flowery in language Zelda pulls off a nice piece of work. The book basically goes through telling about Zelda Fitzgeralds' life only she tells it through the eyes of a character named Alabama. If you arent familiar with Zelda's life its quite the tragic story. Goes through her life in Alabama(the state), then her marriage to a great painter(portrays the role of F. Scott) and how they achieved stardom and then lost it all. If you dont like reading things that are very descriptive and use lots of metaphors and similes dont read this book. However it is really quite good and youll fall in love with all the imagery. The book is double sided, both portraying the beauty of life as well as its suffering. Really I do recommend.

The autobiographical novel by Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was initially published to indifferent reviews in 1932 and parallels the scenes & characters in the novel, Tender Is The Night, which was written by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ring Lardner, a friend of the couple, wrote at the time, "Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty."

Much has been made about some of her writing being done after she suffered her second breakdown and was convalescing in Phipps Clinic at John Hopkins University. Zelda began developing the novel in January 1932 and was hospitalized after her father died on February 12.

Her first breakdown was in April 1930, soon after she abandoned a 3-year effort to become a professional dancer. She was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In her book Zelda is Alabama Beggs and F. Scott is David Knight (the original name was Amory Blaine). In Tender Is The Night - published in 1934 - Zelda is Nicole Diver, one F. Scott's most (in)famous characters.

The first draft was either lost or destroyed and - depending upon the historian's perspective - F. Scott either was a passive advisor on revisions or made editorial changes because of the highly personal nature of the novel.

The Fitzgerald's public personas had gone from the leaders of the endless party that was the 1920s - both drank heavily and F. Scott suffered from alcoholism - to being blamed for the societal excesses of the post-World War I years. F. Scott was well aware of this growing public criticism and Tender Is The Night was going to be his greatly-anticipated novel after the overwhelming success of The Great Gatsby.

Save Me The Waltz can be a challenging read because many of the scenes are driven by dialogue that may best be described as banal. But to downplay its importance is wrong, since it describes from a woman's perspective a relationship that played out under the bright lights of the public stage.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was not a novelist like her husband, but she was hardly a novelty. Save Me The Waltz is the sad voice from a marriage that ultimately could not exit the dance floor without the haunting sounds of sad refrains reverberating through their lives.

This uneven but fascinating book is the last great thing Zelda did before losing her spirit completely under "treatment" in a NC mental hospital.

Because he wrote it as an answer to Waltz, I immediately read F Scott's Tender is the Night (a creepy whitewash of the very sinister suppression of Zelda's spirit and Scott's many flings). But Waltz would be best read alongside any of the biographical books about Zelda Fitzgerald (see Milford, Cline, Wagner-Martin). As a time capsule, it's invaluable. Utterly fascinating to discover slang that disappeared, slang that endured. What passed as the zenith of witty repartee in the jazz age comes off today as just so much drunken verbal oneupmanship by phony snobs. I winced. Often.

But in this book, she captures a real physical joy of being beautiful and popular, a giddy tingle of fame and fortune, the reckless confidence of affluence and privilege. Call it a real taste of the roaring twenties, but there are plenty of wealthy drunks living this sort of high life today. It just seems more charming when we think of it as the history of the lost generation.

No matter time or location, reader is at just one degree of separation from the life of the most charming American couple in Paris in those days. I loved reading the atmospheric sections on wild parties that lasted for days on end (far more intense than F Scott's own Tender). And Zelda's accounts of the bitter struggles of ballet dancers were an eye opener for me.

But the book is not the work of a polished writer. There's no sense of pace, and we glean more from context than anything else. Love affairs (revealed by biographers) are agonizingly glossed over (probably due to her husband acting as initial editor), her toddling daughter is annoyingly precocious and articulate, and the endless similes drove this reader up the wall. Flower fetishists will no doubt achieve states of ecstasy reading sections of this book, those a total bore for anyone else.

Perhaps with more practice, Zelda could have become so much more than the beautiful ornament of her husband, the big handsome literary star. There's evidence of talent in Waltz, and the fact that she could crank it out in 2 months' time... well, she had the drive and determination to shine.

The brilliance of this mind writing at a stage of desperation is astonishing. She wrote the book in six weeks. Her husband Scott, tormented her upon finding out that she used the same material that he used in Tender is NIght. It is believed that he was furious with her and induced another breakdown. The first draft is lost forever, after Scott's editing. What remains is a sad and tender story of of madness and loss. The love between Alabama and David is not sugar coated as it is in letters that they wrote to one another. the Judge comes across as a Biblical figure. The second part of the book was one of the best written about dance.

I'm mostly reviewing the bookstore here, i purchased the book as a present for my girlfriend. The idea was a last minute one that was perfect for our anniversary. the bookstore was able to get it to me so quickly that it arrived on our anniversary, in great shape, made me look like a hero and made her day.

Thanks again!
john

My copy of this book claims that it was written in 6 weeks and that it was written while Zelda Fitzgerald was in the mental hospital. This pretty much ends my fascination with fast-written books by mental patients.

The book is interesting if you are an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, but there's nothing to lend to its credibility. The main character has no insights as to how she became like she became and she doesn't say anything concerning F. Scott Fitzgerald that has any interest whatsoever. Pretty much it's a tragedy of a southern belle used to being the center of attention who must play the role of The Writer's Wife. She tries to be creative, but her lack of talent in all areas (including writing) only works against her.

It's sad, but it's also pointless.