Spoilers ahead.
I didn’t know F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Did you? I finished this story in about 2 hours tops. I saw the movie a couple of weekends ago with Katambra. We loved it. The movie was ADORABLE, all the way through, adorable. I love the old man C-list character that got struck by lightening 7 times. So I was excited to start reading the book. After reading, I found myself preferring the movie over the book which I rarely ever do.
The book wasn’t very descriptive. It went over 50 plus years of Benjamin Button with a few sentences each for each phase of his life. I guess that is why the movie had so much room to digress and flesh out. In the movie, Benjamin was left on a doorsteps of a cute Black lady who ran a nursing home. She cared for him as if he was her son. In the book the father never gave him up.
What won me over to the movie and turned me off towards the book was that Benjamin met his love in the movie at age 7 with him looking elderly. It was a coming of age story about the two of them with tons of hit and misses. They finally meet in the middle and he eventually leaves her after they have a baby together. He thought it was the best thing for his love since he didn’t want to have her raise her husband as he gets younger and their child at the same time.
In the book however, he meets the girl later and as he grows younger and better looking, he gets embarrassed and turned off from his wife because she gets older and uglier. My heart sank as I read that.
Very original idea though. I liked the the story enough to make me want to reread Great Gatsby. I only remember one scene from Gatsby. It’s where Nick criticizes Daisy for being a bad driver (like I am) and she responds that it only matters if she runs into another bad driver.