Book Review: Babylon Revisited collects three stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) from various points in his career. The earliest piece is "The Cut-Glass Bowl," which appeared in his first set of short stories, the appropriately named Flappers and Philosophers (1920). Next is the title piece, which was collected in the final assemblage of stories published during his lifetime, Taps at Reveille (1935). The third story is the rarely collected "The Lost Decade," more an experimental, sensory sketch published in December 1939, a year before his death. Fitzgerald's usual themes of loss, disappointment, regret, and punishment run through all three works. One feels the sense of paradise lost, though for Fitzgerald Paradise was usually fleeting, a mere moment, and perhaps not even appreciated at the time. For Fitzgerald's female characters the stakes were even more precipitous. In "The Cut Glass Bowl," a former beau gives a woman "a present that's as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through." By the final page she has confronted "the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire." "Babylon Revisited," the best piece here, looks back looks back at the glory days of ex-pat Americans on the Left Bank of Paris after the crash and through the cold light of responsibility, cost, and retribution. Catholic guilt drips from the pages. The story was filmed in 1954 as an elaborate technicolor melodrama titled The Last Time I Saw Paris, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson. Different from the story but solid entertainment. "The Lost Decade," just three or four pages long, also looks back at one man's punishing past, but with a stronger resolve, a sterner gaze. As is typical with Penguin's mini Modern Classics, Babylon Revisited gives a good overview of Fitzgerald's short stories (his novels are a different animal), providing both an enjoyable appetizer and a reliable test whether his stories are for the individual reader. [4★]
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