Tender is the Night

Finally, after months of stop-start reading, I have finished Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald's final novel. Why, I wonder, has it taken so long for me to complete it when it's such a good book? The tragic stories of Dick and Nicole Diver are hard to forget, the writing is lyrical, intelligent and full of poetic description. Perhaps it's the shifting timeframes that make it hard to grasp, and the amount of imagination the reader has to use to fill in the narrative gaps. I found that reading it in short bursts, sometimes re-reading the pages that I'd ended with before, helped in keeping up the energy needed to get the most out of Fitzgerald's prose. So perhaps in the end it's no bad thing that it's taken such a long time to read, but I can't help feeling that I might have missed out on the general sweep of the novel. Did anyone else have the same problem reading it?