Beautifully Damned

My main post-Ambassadors reading has been Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, though I've been dipping around in other desultory odds & ends. I must admit that reading something entirely comprehensible at first glance was quite a relief after the rigours of the late-Jamesian sentence. I was a bit surprised generally at the momentum of Fitzgerald's second novel. For some reason I remembered it as being a bit of mess when I first read it a few decades back but either it has changed since then or I have. Unlike This Side of Paradise it was clear where the narrative was going from the earliest chapters, and I mean clear in the best sense. Yes, the mess of Anthony's marriage is predictable, but only in the same sense that Lear's failure as a father is inherent in all his actions when we first meet him. I'm not suggesting that The Beautiful and the Damned rises to tragedy (though its awful title seems to aspire to that kind of significance) but it works well in a kind of there-but-for-the grace-of-God-go-I manner.

I was intending to say a bit more about the novel but my evening has been delightfully disrupted by Noi's massage lady paying a visit, along with Kak Kiah & Udin's children. The lady kindly threw in a back-rub for me in addition to her services to the ladies and, as a result, I've spent the last fifty minutes in massage-heaven instead of getting on with the numerous jobs I need to attend to. Curiously the lady spent part of that time audibly eructating as she vigorously pressed on - it seems my veins are full of wind and I was passing that on to her. The slight downside of any kind of massage I get from Malay experts is that they seem to enjoy telling me of my numerous physical short-comings. In Nenek's days of health she used to deliver a mean back-rub and she made it quite clear she regarded me as a weakling of at least the second, if not the first, order.

Noi has just told me that I gave the lady a headache, in that I passed my strained thoughts onto her. I feel good, but mildly guilty.