My Book Review on 'Living Well Is The Best Revenge' by Calvin Tomkins

Note: I just sold my copy of this book thru my Amazon.com store:

Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There is something very aptly highlighted about the title of this book that in turned prompted me to spend time reading it. It's actually a brief book that I finished in a less than a week during my trips to and fro the city. It's a memoir about persons whose lives were the inspiration of the characters in Fitzgerald's 'Tender Is The Night' - it would have helped me a lot to appreciate this memoir better (or put things in a perspective) if I read before that Fitzgerald book or even took time to watch the movie version. But of course, I didn't. I just decided that I have to read this book largely on the basis of its evocative, supremely wise-sounding title that I could imagine myself saying to certain friends who are now enemies or out of my life (thankfully). But that's going too far for this review.

Read this book and you'll be reminded of your own mortality even for a brief moment. Whatever your age now, you'll see how youth can be a glorious period in your life after you read this book. It also would remind you of things that you could have opted to do when you were younger and with much more power and energy and with less fear - but now you see that period is gone forever. I can just imagine how the couple whose lives were narrated in this book would have become the heavy-weight celebrities that they could turned out to be if they kept on leading their lifestyle when they were in France when Picasso, Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, MacLeish, among others were around as their friends. This is the kind of lifestyle that PR Practitioners or marketing guys/gals would dream for their clients or even themselves. It felt glamorous and dramatic all at the same time as I read this book. But people change lifestyles eventually, as disasters, deaths, ill-health, tragedy, poverty take place in due time. All these near-momentous periods happened in the lives of the Murphy couple and their children. But, still, there's something so charming, nonetheless, with the way this book presented their lives. The charm is all about those nostalgic periods of the 1920s up to the 1940s. We could only see them in pictures, in old movies and in well-written memoirs like this one.



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