Name : The Great Gatsby
Writer : F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publishing year : 1925
Language : English
Type : Classic / Novel
How come ? : When you say "American classic", it's impossible not to bring The Great Gatsby to the table, along with The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reflecting each the zeitgeist of their author and his time. Add to that the fact that a DiCaprio movie is coming out as the hundredth (approximately) adaptation of the book, and there you got me interested.
Estimated time : About 7 hours.
Main themes : Decadence, Pursuing dreams (The American Dream), the meaning of Greatness, Family, Love, Money, Merit vs social inheritance, Morality..
Recommended for : The book is really a story, and who doesn't like stories ? It's the story that will appeal especially to people who dream, and people who don't believe in dreaming. It's also a novel of hope and the lack of it, a novel social satire of the time.
Really, it's the kind of book everyone can really (but will not be equally) appreciate.
The book in a few words : The story of a mysterious rich man who rose to Greatness out of the blue, become the man of its time with little to nothing known about him.
The synopsis : After moving to new grounds, Nick couldn't help noticing the huge mansion next to his new property, a mansion always full of life and excitement that belongs to a man with good intentions and unknown past.
The Rating : Excellent 9/10
The Review :
The only bitter thing about reading this book is that, after being exposed to such greatness in style and story craft, I can no more enjoy "average" books anymore.
With hardly a week distancing this review and the previous one, and as much ridiculous this comparison is, it's imminent how big the difference is between a book and a Great book.
One of the turn-offs of the previous books as I stated was the lack of description in a supposedly post-apocalyptic, futuristic frame of time. If there were any dust of dissatisfaction I might have kept from my last read, this book, The Great Gatsby, blew it with big winds.
When not occupied narrating events, Nick, the narrator/pseudo-protagonist, enjoys describing. And we as readers get to enjoy as much reading those descriptions.
With an incredible gift of writing, Mr. Fitzgerald didn't only garnish his pages with remarkable descriptions of feasts and gowns and faces, he was of such sensitivity that he'd add a random detail to a scene that seems far off expectations yet so ingeniously appropriate, the kind of details that will make you smile if you read the sentence again, thinking of how the hell could his mind manage to integrate such little, rather volatile remarks into the silky flow of the story, and make you all along feel horrible and desperate for lacking such quintessential quality, if you're an aspiring writer (like me, me prior reading this book :v). He gave soul to random aspects of the novel that are otherwise very unneeded and forgettable; Even in the lavishly extravagant parties at Gatsby's, Nick would at times notice a quirk that would make a rather boring listing of names a true object of appreciation (When reading Persuasion, one the things I didn't like was the overflow of named faceless characters, or those people who are just in for one second and you're supposed to forget about them without asking why the author bothered giving them names in the first place..) .. In Gatsby, you'd find sentences like "We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter." I just love to imagine how he came up with her existence, or even better "[long list of invited people] .. and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all." .. I was like "what xD ?". It hits you when you least see it coming, and you can't help enjoying it.
The use of language is probably The Great Gatsby's sweet spot. Mr. Fitzgerald has a gift of manipulating many words and meanings into one delicious chicken soup. The description were at times just jaw-dropping (Daisy's singing, the Valley of Ashes, and then, Gatsby's smile. I reread it like 14 times), with a unique ability to use words out of their universes and pull off a magnificent rendition of meanings, images and metaphors. When blocks of building become slices of a big white cake, the lights get the ability to whisper, the moonlight becomes wet and colors are used to describe things that colors usually don't describe, you know you're in for something special, something unique (more of his tasteful sense of description in the "favorite passages" section, in which I would have gladly copied half of the book, honestly).
To create an amazing atmosphere, the author didn't have to keep on writing elongated, overly-polished paragraphs. From time to time he'd use very short sentences that would just step up and out and give a very fresh, welcomed feeling of liveliness. "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly.". Such a short, perfect sentence.
The novel isn't event-charged and thus the author had to make the jumps between an event and the following (ellipses), sometimes even in the same chapter, yet they were so comfortable that you'll hardly notice. This is also a proof of the author's high mastery of storytelling : the narration never gets boring, and that's a hard thing to say in general. More points to Mr. Fitzgerald !
A final note regarding the narrator who sat himself apart since the get-go, reciting the rule his father taught him of reserving judgement. This gives us a quite objective, camera-man kind of character to start with. With a laid-back air, Nick didn't get personal and therefore made what he said reliable, only to fall in the end short of his promise to keep from criticizing as his sage father told him. It was a good change to have a narrator who doesn't get directly implied in the plot and thus creating the illusion of a third person perspective from the eyes of the first person's.
Then there is the lasting charm of the characters. I liked every individual main character, even the ones made vile because they were brilliantly made so. From the appallingly shallow, beautiful Daisy to quiet, watchful Nick, the novel did best at showing what kind of people lived in that time : "the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
Finally, the ending. I kind of wished the ending was more fair and freaking Daisy gets to Jail or get stabbed by her husband or something, but no, Gatsby the self-made man got killed, Wilson the worker became a murderer, Daisy ran away unscrupulously with her stupid, racist, egocentric husband.. It wasn't the ending I wanted, but it was the ending the novel deserved. It's a novel that is supposed to reflect upon an era of the American history and a comment on the now-celebrated american dream : the eternal pursuit of complete happiness can blindside all the other things that equally matter.
All in all, this book is just beautiful.The story, even though not ocean deep, is a very well conceived excuse to set life to those characters, all designed to drive the flow to the ultimate message of the novel that is yet to be decisive. The use of language is only bad because it makes one conscious about the existence of such literal superiority. The witty dialogues, the exquisite descriptions, the ebb and the flow of the story, the death of Gatsby and the cowardliness of everyone whom he tried to get acknowledgment from, is just a sad, perfect mixture.
I didn't give it a 10 or at least a 9.5 for two reasons : The ending that is so bittersweet and as I stated before, felt unbalanced (just because I viewed the story morally), and the relative shortness, I wish there were more digging in his past, maybe some subplots, just anything to extend the greatness.
I also see a lot of hidden potential in the book, things that I would have not fully captured (essentially when I was reading it when I'm half-asleep :v), so there're that too.
Other than that I couldn't find a single flaw to point out. Chapeau bas.
Favorite character :
Jay Gatsby.
Oddly enough, I was intending to entitle Nick Carraway as such. But only at the end, almost the very end, that it becomes impossible not to feel an urge to be a friend of Gatsby's, or more likely Jimmy. Although a lot of mad american students who have to study The Great Gatsby at school find his "great"-ness highly debatable for amassing money from elicit activities, general shallowness and unidimensionality, pursuing blindly his dream of recreating the past through gaining possession of the only object that's missing of his collection -Daisy-, it's hard not to like the man's dedication to this sole dream of his. The last chapter was heart-wrenching to say the least, beautifully melancholic and just sad. For a man who was of so much importance and so high manners that were so unlike the inborn snobbishness of the rich-blooded, Gatsby was a rose that only unfolded to prettier shades until it's a bare, motionless core, laying on a coffin, friendless and ill-respected and betrayed by his sole love. The notes on the old book hit me hard on the feels, and so I name Gatsby, the unlikely hero, a Great man.
And I can't put it better than Nick : "‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’".
Favorite passages :
Man, it's hard to select !
The book is really wonderful and all quotable-material. Some of them gain extra relevance when read on the context of the book (actually all of them, but some more than others), and some just stick out, too brilliant to be overlooked.
I went a little liberal about the quantity .. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous text.
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had he advantages that you’ve had.’"
With hardly a week distancing this review and the previous one, and as much ridiculous this comparison is, it's imminent how big the difference is between a book and a Great book.
One of the turn-offs of the previous books as I stated was the lack of description in a supposedly post-apocalyptic, futuristic frame of time. If there were any dust of dissatisfaction I might have kept from my last read, this book, The Great Gatsby, blew it with big winds.
When not occupied narrating events, Nick, the narrator/pseudo-protagonist, enjoys describing. And we as readers get to enjoy as much reading those descriptions.
With an incredible gift of writing, Mr. Fitzgerald didn't only garnish his pages with remarkable descriptions of feasts and gowns and faces, he was of such sensitivity that he'd add a random detail to a scene that seems far off expectations yet so ingeniously appropriate, the kind of details that will make you smile if you read the sentence again, thinking of how the hell could his mind manage to integrate such little, rather volatile remarks into the silky flow of the story, and make you all along feel horrible and desperate for lacking such quintessential quality, if you're an aspiring writer (like me, me prior reading this book :v). He gave soul to random aspects of the novel that are otherwise very unneeded and forgettable; Even in the lavishly extravagant parties at Gatsby's, Nick would at times notice a quirk that would make a rather boring listing of names a true object of appreciation (When reading Persuasion, one the things I didn't like was the overflow of named faceless characters, or those people who are just in for one second and you're supposed to forget about them without asking why the author bothered giving them names in the first place..) .. In Gatsby, you'd find sentences like "We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter." I just love to imagine how he came up with her existence, or even better "[long list of invited people] .. and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all." .. I was like "what xD ?". It hits you when you least see it coming, and you can't help enjoying it.
The use of language is probably The Great Gatsby's sweet spot. Mr. Fitzgerald has a gift of manipulating many words and meanings into one delicious chicken soup. The description were at times just jaw-dropping (Daisy's singing, the Valley of Ashes, and then, Gatsby's smile. I reread it like 14 times), with a unique ability to use words out of their universes and pull off a magnificent rendition of meanings, images and metaphors. When blocks of building become slices of a big white cake, the lights get the ability to whisper, the moonlight becomes wet and colors are used to describe things that colors usually don't describe, you know you're in for something special, something unique (more of his tasteful sense of description in the "favorite passages" section, in which I would have gladly copied half of the book, honestly).
To create an amazing atmosphere, the author didn't have to keep on writing elongated, overly-polished paragraphs. From time to time he'd use very short sentences that would just step up and out and give a very fresh, welcomed feeling of liveliness. "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly.". Such a short, perfect sentence.
The novel isn't event-charged and thus the author had to make the jumps between an event and the following (ellipses), sometimes even in the same chapter, yet they were so comfortable that you'll hardly notice. This is also a proof of the author's high mastery of storytelling : the narration never gets boring, and that's a hard thing to say in general. More points to Mr. Fitzgerald !
A final note regarding the narrator who sat himself apart since the get-go, reciting the rule his father taught him of reserving judgement. This gives us a quite objective, camera-man kind of character to start with. With a laid-back air, Nick didn't get personal and therefore made what he said reliable, only to fall in the end short of his promise to keep from criticizing as his sage father told him. It was a good change to have a narrator who doesn't get directly implied in the plot and thus creating the illusion of a third person perspective from the eyes of the first person's.
Then there is the lasting charm of the characters. I liked every individual main character, even the ones made vile because they were brilliantly made so. From the appallingly shallow, beautiful Daisy to quiet, watchful Nick, the novel did best at showing what kind of people lived in that time : "the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired."
Finally, the ending. I kind of wished the ending was more fair and freaking Daisy gets to Jail or get stabbed by her husband or something, but no, Gatsby the self-made man got killed, Wilson the worker became a murderer, Daisy ran away unscrupulously with her stupid, racist, egocentric husband.. It wasn't the ending I wanted, but it was the ending the novel deserved. It's a novel that is supposed to reflect upon an era of the American history and a comment on the now-celebrated american dream : the eternal pursuit of complete happiness can blindside all the other things that equally matter.
All in all, this book is just beautiful.The story, even though not ocean deep, is a very well conceived excuse to set life to those characters, all designed to drive the flow to the ultimate message of the novel that is yet to be decisive. The use of language is only bad because it makes one conscious about the existence of such literal superiority. The witty dialogues, the exquisite descriptions, the ebb and the flow of the story, the death of Gatsby and the cowardliness of everyone whom he tried to get acknowledgment from, is just a sad, perfect mixture.
I didn't give it a 10 or at least a 9.5 for two reasons : The ending that is so bittersweet and as I stated before, felt unbalanced (just because I viewed the story morally), and the relative shortness, I wish there were more digging in his past, maybe some subplots, just anything to extend the greatness.
I also see a lot of hidden potential in the book, things that I would have not fully captured (essentially when I was reading it when I'm half-asleep :v), so there're that too.
Other than that I couldn't find a single flaw to point out. Chapeau bas.
Favorite character :
Jay Gatsby.
Oddly enough, I was intending to entitle Nick Carraway as such. But only at the end, almost the very end, that it becomes impossible not to feel an urge to be a friend of Gatsby's, or more likely Jimmy. Although a lot of mad american students who have to study The Great Gatsby at school find his "great"-ness highly debatable for amassing money from elicit activities, general shallowness and unidimensionality, pursuing blindly his dream of recreating the past through gaining possession of the only object that's missing of his collection -Daisy-, it's hard not to like the man's dedication to this sole dream of his. The last chapter was heart-wrenching to say the least, beautifully melancholic and just sad. For a man who was of so much importance and so high manners that were so unlike the inborn snobbishness of the rich-blooded, Gatsby was a rose that only unfolded to prettier shades until it's a bare, motionless core, laying on a coffin, friendless and ill-respected and betrayed by his sole love. The notes on the old book hit me hard on the feels, and so I name Gatsby, the unlikely hero, a Great man.
And I can't put it better than Nick : "‘They’re a rotten crowd,’ I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’".
Favorite passages :
Man, it's hard to select !
The book is really wonderful and all quotable-material. Some of them gain extra relevance when read on the context of the book (actually all of them, but some more than others), and some just stick out, too brilliant to be overlooked.
I went a little liberal about the quantity .. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous text.
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had he advantages that you’ve had.’"
"‘I’ll tell you a family secret,’ she whispered enthusiastically. ‘It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?’
‘That’s why I came over tonight.’"
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
"This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."
‘Doesn't her husband object?’ ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York.
He’s so dumb he doesn't know he’s alive.’. Ironic.
"At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses."
"Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face."
"His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible."
"Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
"People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away."
"The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.". Beautiful structure.
"Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission."
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd."
.. This is definitely one of the best descriptions I've ever read.
"and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires."
"and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires."
" ‘You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your——’ He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand."
"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."
"Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air."
"There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pursuing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles.". Graceless circles, enough said.
"‘What are you doing?’ I inquired.
‘Just standing here, old sport.’
Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation."
"No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents"
Hard not to love Gatz after this.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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