Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.

I am a Classics person, but not a Modern Classics reader. I prefer the Victorian and pre-Victorian Classics and Modern Classics have never really interested me. However, even before I began this Reading Challenge I knew that I needed to change that. I'm still not overly enamoured with Modern Classics (though they tend to be a lot shorter than Victorian Classics are, which can come as a relief) but I am thoroughly enjoying the journey through the genre.

This book was quite a disappointment and not a surprise at the same time. I knew I wasn't going to love it before I went in to it, though I don't know why. I had no preconceptions of this book: I've never seen the film and I haven't ever read a blurb about it. My copy doesn't have one. I just knew I wouldn't love it.

I didn't think I wouldn't like it, though. I can't really think of any specifics, I just didn't like the plot, the characters or the setting at all. There were some fun moments, some dire moments and just a whole lot of dullness going around. It's hard to really enjoy something if you don't feel any sympathy or empathy with the characters, not even mentioning that ever-present idea that we need to identify with characters, too. I also found that this book wasn't particularly American, or particularly 20s, or particularly anything at all, really. It was just a kind of story with a kind of moral to it.

The one thing I will say about this: F. Scott is a wonderful writer. I kind of thought this before I went in, but I never really knew until I found I was re-reading sentences over and over again just to re-live them. Not what they were saying, or what they were telling, or showing, or portraying, or anything like that, but just the words used and in which order. Sometimes it felt like magic. I will definitely read more F. Scott, but this one really isn't great at all. But that's okay. Most Classics aren't that great, anyway, we just pretend they are most of the time.


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Se me olvidó actualizar la info de este libro en GR, oops. Luego dejo un review por acá, aunque ya expliqué mi sentir en el Wrap up de Los Juegos de Booktube, en el canal.

OH, y no estoy segura del rating que le puse al libro, en estos días pensaré si debo subirlo o bajarlo, sigo muy pensativa al respecto.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past": I think this must be favorite quote of all the readers who know how to appreciate this remarkable classic.

Fighting against the obstacles that life has thrown at you as the past’s misdemeanors being you down! That’s why I chose this book as my flashback Saturday read! Each time I reread it, I find something different to enchant me!

Mostly I enjoyed Gatsby and narrator Nick’s complex relationship than the doomed to fail love story between Daisy and Gatsby.

The characterization of the book is remarkable and the message is clear, choosing wealth over the happiness not always makes you the winner. The financial security comes with its own burden!

Gatsby is fictional character represents the American Dream after WW 1 before the Great Depression changed the entire economic balance. According to the hedonist, arrogant Gatsby who controls the wealth also controls the power. At some parts the power defeats the person’s individualism.

Most of the people like Gatsby don’t hesitate to turn to crime for preserving their financial strength. Tom and Daisy are another exemplary couple who are so vicious to protect their own power over people, acting mean, never thinking over the consequences.

Overall: poetic writing style, deeply layered, well- constructed characterization and remarkable conclusion. That’s why it’s always pleasure for me to read this book over and over again.

Here are my other favorite quotes of the book:

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. “

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”

so... why exactly is this unimpressive piece of cheap melodrama still glorified & labelled as the Great American Novel?

*3.5 stars *

A long overdue reread, which I enjoyed all over again!

At some point in high school, a usually supercilious teacher stands in front of a group of highly suggestive students and holds up a copy of The Great Gatsby waxing poetic about how it is such a marvelous masterpiece.

tAnd—make no mistake—it is. After the eager, young students read The Great Gatsby, the inevitable conclusion is that no piece of literature will ever come close to reaching this impossibly high standard. What isn’t always readily apparent is twofold.

tOne. The Great Gatsby wasn’t Fitzgerald’s first novel. It was his third after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and then The Beautiful and Damned. He also churned out plays and short stories. He developed his writing skills over the years.

tTwo. The Great Gatsby didn’t just magically flow from the tip of Fitzgerald’s pencil. There were several drafts of The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald wrote this book over a span of years; it took nearly three years for The Great Gatsby to go from the planning phase to ultimate publication. Three years.

As early as June 1922, Fitzgerald began planning The Great Gatsby according to Matthew Bruccoli in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (page 53), and in October 1922, Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck, Long Island (West Egg), the primary setting for the book. In a letter dated to Willa Cather, Fitzgerald said that he was “in the middle of the first draft A Lost Lady [Willa Cather’s novel] was published.” A Lost Lady was published in 1923. Finally, The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925.

tFun Fact: In the very earliest versions of The Great Gatsby, Daisy was named Ada, and Nick was named Dud.

tIn the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, you can see that the famous quotes weren’t quite refined yet. For example, in the manuscript, “an extraordinary aliveness to life, an alert vitality such as I have never found in any human person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again,” doesn’t quite stir the soul as much as, “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

tThe manuscript mentions psychic radio, garbage men, and dope. None of which found their way into the published version.

tThe manuscript also shows where Fitzgerald struggled—there are many drafts of the confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby. Further, in the manuscript, Daisy was much more into Gatsby, confiding in Nick that she plans to leave Tom in a couple of months and then she shows up at Gatsby’s house with her things packed, ready to run away with him. Later, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter that he could never quite nail Daisy’s reaction. However, I would argue that the published version is ideal because it mimics the authentic feel of love where one may know his or her own feelings but is not completely sure if the other person fully reciprocates.

tInstead of setting impossibly high standards, the manuscript makes writing more accessible. With perhaps enough versions and revisions, greatness is within reach. Or one can hope.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $240 from SP Books

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"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.

"The Great Gatsby" is considered by many to be the zenith of American fiction writing in the last century. I won't say that it is the best American novel I've read but I will say it is probably the most perfect.

Along with J.D. Salinger, Fitzgerald has got to be my favorite writer of fiction. As opposed to Hemingway's bluntness, and Faulkner's artiness, Fitzgerald's prose seems(to paraphrase Michael Chabon) to rain down from style heaven. His style in fact is like the ladies he writes about: cool, lean and absolutely enchanting. He would never dream of overwriting and knows exactly when to hold back for maximum effect. His use of the language is assured and consequently eminently readable. For that alone this should be considered the Mona Lisa of prose.

What is astounding though is how he puts his sparsely elegant style to use giving his characters shade and depth. Fitzgerald is a true student of humanity and his skills of observation are razor sharp. He sums up his characters in sentences that read like aphorisms bulging with truth about the human condition. There's not a page goes by I'm not gasping at the depth of his vision and the economy he uses to express it.

So far I've dwelt on how he wrote and not on what he wrote. People who'd back another nag in the Great American Novel derby knock Fitzgerald's sophomoric (their word not mine) obsession with romance between men and women. They reduce his works to the level of melodramatic tear jerkers. This is a gross simplification of his talents. Yes "Gatsby" focuses on a doomed love affair but it does so to illustrate the errors in thinking that he felt marred his generation.

Gatsby is about the hollowness of the American dream as dreamt in the twenties. Fitzgerald looked around him (and in the mirror)and saw men and women locked in a frenzied and ultimatley doomed race for speed, money and sin. Gatsby and Daisy's love is doomed because their values have been distorted by money and comfort and opulence. They cannot see the depths because they are too easily distracted by shiny surfaces. When Daisy cries as Gatsby shows off his elegantly tailored shirts because she has never seen clothes so beautiful sums up perfectly how for her exteriors matter most. This is at the heart of the tragedy that unfolds before us in this delicious little novel.

There is no denying this is one of the GREAT BOOKS. If you haven't read it do so. I dare you to not fall in love with it.

There once was a man they called Jay,
A symbol of Jazz Age decay.
And just as Scott held a
Fixation for Zelda,
Jay’s Daisy dream sure made him pay!

- لا يمكن قراءة هذه الرواية الا في سياقها التاريخي، فهي تتحدث عن المرحلة التي تلت الحرب العالمية الأولى وما خلّفته تلك الحرب من ضياع وفوضى وخلل اخلاقي ساد العالم برمته.

- "جاتسبي العظيم"، واغلب الظن ان العظيم تعني عكس معناها تماماً، وقد استعملها الكاتب كنوع من السخرية ليس من جاتسبي بل من العصر السائد حينها والذي لا زال مستمراً بالكثير من تفاصيله الى وقتنا هذا.

- لنبدأ من الخاتمة " لقد آمن غاتسبي بالضوء الأخضر، بالمستقبل الحسي الممتع الذي يتراجع عاماً بعد عام امامنا. حينئذٍ كان يراوغنا، ولكن لا يهم – غداً سنركض أسرع، نفتح أذرعنا اكثر... وذات صباح – وهكذا نتقدم، كقوارب تسير عكس التيار، عائدين دون توقف الى قلب الماضي.": هذه الخاتمة الرائعة تقول لنا ببساطة ان غاتسبي آمن بالدولار (الضوء الأخضر) وبالمستقبل المادي (الحسي الذي تشتريه المادة) لكنه خاب امله وبينما كان يرنو للمستقبل قفلت الحياة به الى الماضي..

- القصة عبارة عن خيبة امل كبيرة اصابت هذا المسكين فقد كان يبحث عن الحب، الحب المبني على الدولار، فدأب يجمع المادة من اجل حب مراهق قد آفل، ومن اجل حبيبة ظنها على مستوى مشاعره لكنها كانت على مستوى الدولار الذي يملكه غيره كما يملكه هو. هذا الحلم الكبير اضحى كابوساً وسقط في نهاية القصة.

- الشخصيات المنتقاة لهذا العمل كانت ممتازة، فإلى جانب جاتسبي تتواجد حبيبته المادية وزوجها الدنيء، والآنسة جوردان لاعبة الجولف (الرياضات التي درجت بعد الحرب واصبح نجومها محط الأنظار)، "مرتيل" الفقيرة المعدمة التي تخون زوجها من اجل قشرة من الرفاهية، ويلسون (زوج مرتيل) المخدوع ا��موهوم القاتل والمنتحر في النهاية، بعض الرأسماليين والنصابين (الذين درجوا بعد الحرب ايضاً بشكل كبير)، اناس نيويورك الحالمون بعيش الحلم الأمريكي من سهرات وشرب ومضاجعات تحت اضواء القمر بالإضافة الى الخدم والسائق (الفقراء)، هذا المزيج من الفوضى رواه صوت عاقل (السيد نيك كاراوي) ليكون صوت الكاتب وصوت العقل معاً في هذه المعمعة الفوضوية.

- السرد كان لابأس به، رغم ثقله وبطئه في العديد من الأمكنة، والترجمة كانت سيئة جداً ومن دون هوامش تشرح للقارئ العربي ما المقصود ببعض الجمل في اللغة الإنكليزية (كالضوء الأخضر مثلاً كناية عن الدولار)، وهذه احدى الكلاسيكيات التي تحتاج الى اعادة ترجمة فورية.

- بشكل عام القصة كانت جيدة.

A drunk on a train setting a moth free is a sight. The beauty of the catch, one-handed, swift and seemingly effortless as he launches it out the window is humbling as the writing in this novel.

We first see Jay Gatsby on a summer night. "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and stars." Elusive Gatsby is the light to whom Nick, like Melville's Ishmael, is drawn. And like Ahab, Gatsby directs the course of events through "blue gardens" like blue seas holding wealth and destruction.

If riches were all that Gatsby and Ahab pursued, then their journeys would not be doomed. But both men go off track. One for revenge, the other for romance, strives for more than he can grasp. Read them together or in quick succession. Both are written with the care of a moth cradled in an outstretched hand.

Oh Gatsby, you old sport, you poor semi-delusionally hopeful dreamer with “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, focusing your whole self and soul on that elusive money-colored green light - a dream that shatters just when you are *this* close to it.

n  n

Jay Gatsby, who dreamed a dream with the passion and courage few possess - and the tragedy was that it was a wrong dream colliding with reality that was even more wrong - and deadly.

Just like the Great Houdini - the association the title of this book so easily invokes - you specialized in illusions and escape. Except even the power of most courageous dreamers can be quite helpless to allow us escape the world, our past, and ourselves, giving rise to one of the most famous closing lines of a novel.

n  “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 — to-morrow 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.”n

Dear Gatsby, not everything I liked back when I was fourteen has withstood the test of time¹ - but you clearly did, and as I get older, closer to your and Nick Carraway's age, your story gathers more dimensions and more tragedy, fleshing out so much more from what I thought of as a tragic love story when I was a child - turning into a great American tragedy.

¹ I hang my head in shame at my ability to still belt out an enthusiastic (albeit poorly rendered) version of '...Baby One More Time' when it comes on the radio (provided, of course, that my car windows are safely up).

I blame it on my residual teenage hormones.

n

Jay Gatsby, you barged head-on to achieve and conquer your American dream, not stopping until your dreams became your reality, until you reinvented yourself with the dizzying strength of your belief. Your tragedy was that you equated your dream with money, and money with happiness and love. And honestly, given the messed up world we live in, you were not that far from getting everything you thought you wanted, including the kind of love that hinges on the green dollar signs.

And you *almost* saw it, you poor bastard, but in the end you chose to let your delusion continue, you poor soul.

Poor Gatsby! Yours is the story of a young man who suddenly rose to wealth and fame, running like a hamster on the wheel amassing wealth for the sake of love, for the sake of winning the heart of a Southern belle, the one whose n  “voice is full of money”n - in a book written by a young man who suddenly rose to wealth and fame, desperately running on the hamster wheel of 'high life' to win the heart of his own Southern belle. Poor Gatsby, and poor F. Scott Fitzgerald - the guy who so brilliantly described it all, but who continued to live the life his character failed to see for what it was.

n  n

The Great Gatsby is a story about the lavish excesses meant to serve every little whim of the rich and wannabe-rich in the splendid but unsatisfying in their shallow emptiness glitzy and gaudy post-war years, and the resulting suffocation under the uselessness and unexpected oppressiveness of elusive American dream in the time when money was plenty and the alluring seemingly dream life was just around the corner, just within reach.

But first and foremost, it is a story of disillusionment with dreams that prove to be shallow and unworthy of the dreamer - while at the same time firmly hanging on to the idea of the dream, the ability to dream big, and the stubborn tenacity of the dreamer, n  “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”n.

n  n

This is why Gatsby is still so relevant in the world we live in - almost a hundred years after Fitzgerald wrote it in the Roaring Twenties - the present-day world that still worships money and views it as a substitute for the American dream, the world that hinges on materialism, the world that no longer frowns on the gaudiness and glitz of the nouveau riche.

In this world Jay Gatsby, poor old sport, with his huge tasteless mansion and lavish tasteless parties and in-your-face tasteless car and tasteless pink suit would be, perhaps, quietly sniggered at - but would have fit in without the need for aristocratic breeding - who cares if he has the money and the ability to throw parties worthy of reality show fame???

n  n

Because in the present world just the fact of having heaps of money makes you worthy - and therefore the people whose voices are “full of money”, who are “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”, people who genuinely believe that money makes them worthy and invincible are all too common. Tom and Daisy Buchanan would be proud of them.

And wannabe Gatsbys pour their capacity to dream into chasing the shallow dream of dollar signs, nothing more.

n  “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.”n  
n  
n  n

This book somehow hit the right note back when I read it when I was fourteen, and hit even truer note now, deeply resonating with me now, almost a full century since it was written. If you read it for school years ago, I ask you to pick it up and give its pages another look - and it may amaze you.

Five green-light stars in the fog at the end of a dock.

——————
Also posted on my blog.