The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button By F Scott Fitzgerald
Posted at 10:41AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
ISBN: 9780141039343
Because a film has been made of it, starring Brad Pitt, this droll short story has been elevated to the status of a Penguin Classic and reissued in a miniature collection with the more famous "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". The film makers went to incredible lengths to create a computer-generated mini-Brad who could credibly span the three score and 10 years of Benjamin Button's life. Similar feats of imagination and suspension of disbelief are required for the reader to be caught up in this farfetched tale of a life lived backwards. Why are fiction writers so regularly engaged by the conceit of a back-to-front life? At birth, Benjamin is five foot eight inches of septuagenarian. Of his mother nothing is heard except that she is "all right" after the prodigious delivery. Her absence reflects the chilly bloodlessness of this account of an old man who grows to boyhood and, thence, in a parable of senile dementia, to the cooing bliss of babyhood and, ultimately, nothingness.
Guardian review
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