|| 4.0 stars ||

This was very depressing, but in the most compelling way. You see hints of it sprinkled throughout, but you don’t realise quite how depressing it is until you get further into the story.

There was a constant air of mystery and mystique around Gatsby, but in reality he was just a very lonely and sad man. He tried so very hard to appear sophisticated, to showcase his wealth, to make it seem like he belonged. Yet, it was all show. Nobody ever really accepted him. Nobody really cared for him. He was insignificant to everyone, even to the people who went to his parties; they only cared about the lore surrounding him, not the actual person.
But still, Gatsby kept trying to fit in, to appear important. But he simply wasn’t. And nobody wanted him, no matter how generous and inviting he was. He just wanted to be loved, but he never was. Not even by Daisy, whom he did all of this for. Everyone just used him in one way or another, and Daisy worst of all. He loved her so much, he would have done anything for her, and in the end she just completely abused that in the most careless and brutal way possible.
Honestly, I just think that no one really saw Gatsby as a real person, they just saw him as a “figure”. Someone to gossip about or to use to get whatever they wanted, but not someone to actually befriend. No matter how much Gatsby would have liked to find someone who cared, he never did. And so he just remained alone, forgotten and left behind, showing that all of his efforts had been for nothing. Therefore, his tragic ending was very fitting for him and his life, no matter how sad it made me.

Like many people, I first read The Great Gatsby when I was too young to understand it. I appreciated the beauty of Fitzgerald's prose and his gift for describing scenes, but disliked quite a few of his characters and couldn't fathom why they inspired in each other the degree of devotion and obsession that they seemed to do. I also found the narrator a bit dull and the ending a huge let-down. In short, I was convinced Fitzgerald was a good writer (I actually went on to check out some of his short stories immediately afterwards), but couldn't see what all the Gatsby fuss was about.

I think I can see it now, having reread the book a couple of times since then. Yes, it's a novel about the American Dream -- a rags-to-riches story about a poor man who re-invents himself as a mysterious millionaire in hopes of winning the heart of the beautiful rich girl he has fancied ever since they were young. But it's also about the shallowness of that dream, and about the corruption inherent in it -- about the lengths to which people will go for success and acceptance, not necessarily in an admirable way. It's about the gap between dreams and reality, between reality and perception, and about how modern, status-obsessed America is increasingly on the perception side of the gap. It's an indictment of materialism, of the thin veneer of wealth which hides the moral decay underneath. And last but not least, it's a story about what makes us who we are. About how we are shaped by our pasts and backgrounds, and how, no matter how far we run and how hard we try to re-invent ourselves, we are what we are, what we always were. It's a depressing message for the would-be self-improvers among us, but a true one, I think.

Of course, the book also works on a shallower level. The Gatsby-Daisy romance is fascinating, even if both of its protagonists ultimately turn out to be rather vapid and deluded. And Gatsby's dream is nothing if not powerful. If it ends up failing, that's because it was based on wrong assumptions -- assumptions arising from ignorance and greed as well as hope. There's a lot of greed and ignorance in the book, and it makes for memorable (albeit heavily flawed) characters. (I actually believe Jordan Baker is the most interesting character in the book. I'd have loved to see a bit more of her, although I guess it's precisely her elusiveness which makes her so fascinating.) For his part, old-fashioned Nick proves to be an excellent narrator, whose 'provincial squeamishness' adds just the right kind of perspective to all the modern goings-on described in the book. Nick may be unspectacular and unreliable, but to my mind, he's one of the best narrators in the history of modern fiction. Now that I've learnt to appreciate the novel, his disappointment and disillusionment will stay with me for ever, as will his sad resignation. (If, in fact, that is what it is. One never knows with this endlessly subtle novel.)

Simply: one of my favorite books.

I love it with the fervor of a desert wanderer coming upon an oasis. That is, I love it like a thirsty person loves water.

And I was thirsty when I first read this.

It was high school, and my former passion for reading had faded before a syllabus clogged wtih plays in iambic pentameter, long, digressionary novels by Dickens, and poor translations of Dostoyevsky.

Then came The Great Gatsby.

Here was a book that was certified classic. It had the gold stamp of approval from the high gods of literature, and also the school board. But it was also accessible. It was readable. It could mean something to you in a way that Crime and Punishment never would. It didn't have the curse words and the anti-authoritarian stance of The Catcher in the Rye, but, well, I never really had a problem with authority.

Like any masterwork, The Great Gatsby is pregnant with themes: loss of innocence (naturally, since Americans are obsessed with the idea that we once had innocence to lose); deconstruction of the Jazz Age; and the shallowness of wealth with respect to the American Dream.

But slice that away. Tune out the teacher droning on at the front of the class. Gatsby is about a boy trying to get a girl. It is about how we reinvent ourselves for love.

The epigram from Fitzgerald's fictional Thomas Parke D'Invilliers (a bit player from This Side of Paradise) sums up this essence:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; if you can bounce high, bounce high for her too, till she cry 'Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!'

In the summer of 1922, a World War I vet named Nick Carraway - who tells the story in the first-person - rents a house in the fictional village of West Egg, Long Island. His neighbor is the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby.

Nick gains entree into the world of wealthy elites through his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, who is married to Tom. It is a dizzying introduction. Profligate excessiveness, infidelity, and carelessness (both emotional and physical) are the rule.

While the book's essence is easy to distill, the plot is a bit more convoluted, and relies heavily on coincidence and misunderstanding. But the plot is not really the point.

The writing is. And the writing is fantastic.

Fitzgerald's characters from Gatsby have become immortal. There is Daisy, Gatsby's great true love, with her voice "full of money." There is her husband Tom, a former footballer with a "cruel body" and modest intellectual qualities, "one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax."

Anyone who read this in high school can recall the symbols that pepper this novel, from the billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg to Gatsby's green light. Forget all that. The real allure of Gatsby is the casual brilliance of the prose. For instance, on a trip into New York City, Nick notices the "young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." Just a throwaway line, but perfectly evocative.

I have a fondness for prose over plot (though whenever I find myself someplace plot-less, I tend to complain), for journey over destination, and Fitzgerald's writing delivers. Long after I've forgotten the intricacies of who slept with who, I can recall my favorite passages:

The old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it...

And that ending. Oh, what an ending:

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 then one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is a remarkable novel. It is known today as an evocation of a vanished past. A world of bootleggers and free-spenders dancing blindly on the precipice of destruction. But the longing that courses through the pages is relevant in our own lives, and will be relevant to the lives that come after. That is why this book will always exist.

Our fantasies of grandeur are always restricted by our aesthetic tastes and The Great Gatsby is literally an anthem to vulgarity and fraudulence…

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.

The grotesque aesthetic stupidity and the fabulously bad taste of the characters are outright shocking… Instead of wishing for variety and quality, they just want to get more of everything that glitters…

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’

Gatsby is a fraud and the narrator doesn’t have much sympathy for him but in the end the raconteur finds out that the respectable members of society are just hypocrites and that they are even more fake than Gatsby.
Honesty and intellect don’t mean a thing, all that counts is the art of pretending and the greatest pretender takes all.

***2022
Re-read***

Enjoyed the book so much. The tragedy hit me bad

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

The first time I read this novel, I was about a decade younger than the protagonists, and I was mesmerised. All I saw was wealth, glitter, doomed love stories, fast cars, big mansions, secret affairs and emotions running high, criminals getting away with their crimes because they talked and dressed and behaved like money.

The second time I read it, this weekend, I am about a decade older than the protagonists, and I am still mesmerised, but I see something entirely different in the novel. All I can see now is the ugliness of a world devoid of empathy, focusing on a shiny surface to the point of forgetting the most basic human values. I see the dirty soul of rich white supremacy shown in its most disgusting shape. And I see history repeating itself, but not in the way Jay Gatsby hoped. He thought he could own the past, even reinvent it to suit his need for total control over the feelings of another human being. That is not the way history operates though. It comes back to haunt us.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

That is America today - trying to recreate the glitter of a long lost love by digging up the dirt of the past. If one could learn anything from Gatsby, it is that it won't work.

One of the themes of my reading this year is to reread the classic books I read while in school and view them through adult eyes. It is in this light that I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and rated it 3.5 stars.

Taking place during the roaring twenties in Long Island, New York, the story features the up and coming generation, veterans of the Great War and adherents of the American Dream. Our narrator is Nick Carraway a war veteran who has moved east to seek his future in the stocks and bonds market. Although young, he appears out of place amongst the frivolity taking place around him. It is in this light that the story occurs.

Most people most likely know about the story of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby aka James Gatz. All have come to New York to seek the American Dream in one way or another. Usually I am drawn to rags to riches stories like Gatsby's, but I am going to focus on the two elements of the book that had me rate the book lower than other classics.

The first element I did not like was the love affairs that took place throughout the book. Tom and Daisy appear happily married on the surface. At first meeting, they invite Nick to their home in an attempt to set him up with professional golfer Jordan Baker. They have an apparent warm home and beautiful daughter, and, yet, neither is happy. Rather than get on with their lives, each would rather be gallivanting around with others and face the consequences later. This was a major sticking point for me because personally part of the American Dream is bettering oneself to leave a better life for future generations, yet the Buchanans chose to be products of the frivolous decade they lived in.

Fitzgerald paints a picture of life in the twenties that has endured; however, it was a turnoff to me.
The other element that I did not care for was the disjointed story telling. We do not find out completely about Gatsby and his background until near the end of the novel. Usually, the uncertainty makes me want to read pages quickly to find out the twist, but in this particular case, I would have liked to have known sooner, allowing the rest of the plot to shape itself out. Looking back, I believe the disjointed plot parallels the disjointed ways of the Buchanans and Gatsby's lives; I tend to prefer a more straight forward story.

What does make Gatsby a classic for me, and I can see why this book is read in schools because it leads to discussion, is the imagery, especially the green light at the end of the dock, which could symbolize many things. For me, this green light is the American Dream, the seeking of a better life, which is what Gatsby, the Buchanans, and Nick Carraway were striving for in some way during the novel. I can now say that I read The Great Gatsby for the first time in twenty years; yet, the story isn't as timeless for me as other classics I have read.

n  Bright lights, big cityn

When I avowed my disenchantment with Tender Is the Night, a few GR friends urged me to read The Great Gatsby to truly appreciate F. Scott Fitzgerald. I cannot but admit The Great Gatsby was a far more exhilarating read than I had expected it to be, its tight composition and restless pace a remarkable contrast with the muddled slow mess that made Tender Is the Night hard for me to get through, the exquisite, visual opulent writing more than in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button unfurling in all its grandeur, alternating the scrumptious and the gritty, just like the narrative unfolding more coherently.

Reading The Great Gatsby immediately after Tra donne sole (among women only) by Cesare Pavese, featuring also some bored socialites as seen by an outsider who almost unwillingly turns into an insider, it struck me how little difference living in 1922 New York or fifties Turin seemed to make, at least for a certain class of people, the ones leisured and wealthy – however Pavese’s women seem more despondent and philosophical, responding to the shallowness of their lives by cynicism, nihilism or suicide.

F. Scott Fitzgerald paints brightly lit places, populated by shady people. Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Baker and the outsider-insider narrator Nick Carraway are a fine fleur of unlovable, amoral and superficial characters, representatives of old and new money being equally dreadful, reducing friendships and loving relationships to commodities, cheating and lying themselves through their lives, crooks, dishonest to the core, whether in golf, in business or in relationships, so corrupt that even the narrator who conspicuously prides himself on his honesty makes himself untrustworthy by doing so. These are people who are moved to tears by a soft rich heap of beautiful shirts ordered from England, in the meantime thoughtlessly wrecking other people’s lives without even blinking (Pavese’s novel also pivots around haute couture).

They were careless people... they smashed up things and creations and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Among many other things, the Great Gatsby is also tale of the ludicrous things we do for love (and which inevitably will leave us with empty hands), a painful story about holding on to illusions against one’ s better judgment and a cautionary tale on the (at that time perhaps) quintessential American belief in the malleability of the individual, the American dream, at which I am aware as a European I can only look at from a unbridgeable distance, bemused at a cultural trope which feels alien to me. Reading The Great Gatsby as a trenchant commentary on this belief however, Fitzgerald to my surprise struck me as a sheer visionary, illustrating sharply the downsides and dangers of this belief and capitalist ethos even if he couldn’t foresee how this pseudo-meritocratic mentality would spread and spill over times and oceans, how it would change societies and poison individuals with it all over the world in the wake of capitalism and neo-liberalism, which would make it into a personal vocation and permanent responsibility to remodel and market oneself to be a worthy individual in a hyper competitive society (and on the flipside blame oneself if one fails to succeed or succumbs under the pressure to achieve and be happy) – an ethos conditioning individuals who are made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises, judged by (and judging themselves) by what they have and do rather than what they are. If you are so smart why aren’t you rich? No wonder people are lonely and struggle with a warped view of the self and feelings of failure (Paul Verhaeghe, What about Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society). By Jay Gatsby’s fate, Fitzgerald exposes the vicious lie that we can be what and who we want to be if we only work on ourselves and that we will be loved if doing so.



(Illustration: Michelle Lagasca)

As a counterpoint to all the extravagant and baffling materialism of the world he evokes, F. Scott Fitzgerald gently invites the reader to contemplate past, present and future in a burst of melancholic beauty that will glow on in my mind for a long time.

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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."

Great.
Now I'm getting pissed off at classics too. I seem to be upping my game.


How much shallowness can one person stand.
Well, if I feel betrayed, imagine Jay.








Newsflash sweetheart, when a man wants to give you the world, the least you can do is send a flower to his funeral.





I suppose he would have had you not destroyed him.





I've never respected a fictional character more.




And the best part is that now, we don't even have the excuse of a battle between the old wealth and the new rich of the 1920s. This modernity has procured us with a fresh new brand of hollowness. So that we can all hide behind empty shells of betrayals and prejudice.
Mr. Fitzgerald, it seems that the dream of the green light was never more far away than it is at this moment.

Mr. Gatsby, come off it. Get a life. She simply isn't worth it, yaar.

n  ‘i was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.’n

im going to a 1920s themed party tonight and so, naturally (being the bookworm that i am), im gonna do a quick re-read to give me all those gatsby-esque vibes! all the glitzy glamour, flashy fashion, and daring dreams will definitely get me in the mood!

i first read this in 10th grade english class and it will always be a very dear book to me. it was the first classic i read that i felt like i understood. and not only that, it was the first classic that i actually enjoyed, leading me into my love affair with the words of fitzgerald.

i loved (and still do) experiencing the extravagant and luxurious lifestyles, the idea of morality in the 1920s, the scandalous nature of love and betrayal, and how beauty can become corrupted.

such a compelling and tragically wonderful story that will forever remain one of my faves.

↠ 4 stars

This is an all right-ish kind of novel, I suppose, but I always preferred Fitzgerald’s little-known prequel The Average Gatsby, although some people found the vision of Mervyn Gatsby, Jay’s obscure brother, living a reasonably okayish life as the manager of a carpet and upholstery warehouse in Des Moines a trifle dispiriting. I quite agree that The Bad Gatsby was a shameless self-ripoff which did Fitzgerald no favours. (The threesome scene between Warren Harding, John Dillinger and Gatsby was in poor taste and I do not see how it got past the censor. I have never been able to look at a set of deer antlers without blushing ever again.) And I must say that these new franchised-out novels like The Late Gatsby (Jay as vampire, inevitable I suppose), The Grape Gatsby (must be aimed at the vegan crowd) and The Lesbian Gatsby (in which – surprise – he never was a man), followed up by The Straight Gatsby - and The Groped Gatsby in which he was recovering from sexual abuse at the hands of Warren Harding - what can one say - The Ingrate Gatsby (in which he doesn't get rich and is really bitter) - must have literature fans gnawing each other’s kindles in sheer angst. They’re a disgrace. I have even seen a superhero graphic novel called Batgatsby. Or did I dream that. Hmm. Maybe there isn’t a Batgatsby. I wonder if it would sell… I bet it would. Batgatsby.