The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Benjamin Button is born in Baltimore in 1860 looking like a frail old man of seventy, and from there F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story runs time backward for the rest of his life.

His father is horrified by the wrinkled, white-bearded baby in the nursery, and tries for years to make him act like a normal child. But Benjamin only grows younger. He goes to war, takes over the family hardware business, falls for a young woman named Hildegarde Moncrief and marries her — and as the decades pass, he sheds years instead of gaining them. His son grows up and overtakes him in age. Old friends stop recognizing him. Eventually he is a schoolboy again, then a small child, then an infant who remembers nothing at all, cared for by a nurse who has no idea what he once was.

It is a strange, quietly sad little fable, written with the same dry wit Fitzgerald later brought to The Great Gatsby — a piece of early Jazz Age satire about vanity, aging, and how little control anyone really has over their own life's shape. There is no real villain and no big adventure, just one unlikely life told start to finish, with a wink at how society treats the old and the young so differently.

It's a good pick for fans of Fitzgerald's short fiction, or anyone who likes a touch of magical realism in their classics — a shorter, odder cousin to his more famous novels.

Quiet space opens between the scenes, the reading soft and slow, letting Benjamin's backward life carry you gently toward your own night's rest.