Jay Gatsby is the most ambitious, naive cinnamon roll to ever walk the literary earth and I can never get enough of him.

Fitzgerald’s prose is flawless. Every time I read The Great Gatsby, I feel like I’ve been sucked right into a 1920s party (which is sometimes alarming because I look terrible with short hair and omg that’s a lot of people). It’s dreamy, it’s romantic, it’s stunning. And because of it, you don’t even realize you’re reading a book full of toxic, horrible human beings until it punches you in the stomach. Gatsby and Wilson excluded, of course.

I’ve read this book so many times now that I just keep a broom and dustpan at the ready for when it, without fail, shreds my heart into confetti.

Fitzgerald had a lot to say about the American Dream and goddamn did he nail it. Shredders everywhere, man. It’s a masterpiece.


Also, if you like audiobooks, I highly recommend the one read by Frank Muller! He’s the only one I’ll listen to.

I was made to read this in school many years ago and what I got from it was that even obscenely wealthy people can't buy happiness or self-awareness, no matter how glitzy and fabulous a party you throw.

Atención, encontré un clásico que me gustó. Alerten a las autoridades.

After six years of these heated and polarized debates, I'm deleting the reviews that sparked them. Thanks for sharing your frustrations, joys, and insights with me, goodreaders. Happy reading!

In love and good faith, always,
Savannah

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.

n  n

Casual, self-absorbed decadence, the evaporation of social grace, money calling all the shots and memories of the past holding people hostage from the future that lies before them. Yes, Mr. Fitzgerald has nailed it and written one of THE great American novels.

This book was a surprise. I LOVED it and all of the deep contradictions swimming around its heart. At once a scathing indictment on the erosion of the American Dream, but also a bittersweet love letter to the unfailing optimism of the American people. Call it dignified futility…obstinate hopefulness. Whatever you call it, this novel is shiny and gorgeous, written with a sort of breezy pretension that seems to mirror the loose morality of the story. Rarely have I come across a book whose style so perfectly enhances its subject matter.

Set in the eastern United States just after World War I, Fitzgerald shows us an America that has lost its moral compass. This fall from grace is demonstrated through the lives of a handful of cynical “well-to-dos” living lavish but meaningless lives that focus on nothing but the pursuit of their own pleasures and whims.

Standing apart from these happenings (while still being part of them) is our narrator, Nick Carraway. As the one honest and decent person in the story, Nick stands in stark contrast to the other characters. “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” Nick relays the story of the summer he spent in Long Island’s West Egg in a small house sandwiched between the much larger mansions of the area. His time in Long Island is spent with a group that includes his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her rich husband Tom who live in Long Island’s East Egg. At one point in the story, Nick provides the following description of the pair which I do not think can be improved upon:

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

In addition, we have Jordan Baker who is a poster child for the pretty, amoral, self-centered rich girl whose view of the world is jaded and unsentimental. Basically, she’s a bitch.

The most intriguing character by far is Jay Gatsby himself, both for who he is and for how Fitzgerald develops him through the course of the narrative. When we are first introduced to Gatsby, he comes across as a polite, gracious, well-mannered gentleman with a magnetic personality who our narrator takes to immediately.

n  He had 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 as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself. n

However, from that very first encounter, Fitzgerald slowly chips away at the persona and peels back the layers of the “Great” Gatsby until we are left with a flawed and deeply tragic figure that in my opinion ranks among the most memorable in all of classic literature. Nick’s journey in his relationship with Gatsby mirrors our own. “It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”

Through a series of parties, affairs, beatings, drunken escapades, the lives of the characters intermesh with terrible consequences. I don’t want to give away major parts of the story as I think they are best experienced for the first time fresh, but at the heart of Fitzgerald’s morality tale is a tragic love that for me rivaled the emotional devastation I felt at the doomed relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights. In general, Fitzgerald’s world of excessive jubilance and debauchery is a mask that the characters wear to avoid the quiet torments that haunt them whenever they are forced to take stock of their actions. Rather than do this, they simply keep moving. "I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."

In the end, Fitzgerald manages the amazing feat of creating a sad, bleak portrait of America while maintaining a sense of restrained optimism in the future. Both heart-wrenching and strangely comforting at the same time. I guess in the end, this was a book that made me feel a lot and that is all I can ever ask. I’m going to wrap this up with my second favorite quote from the book (my favorite being the one at the very beginning of the review):

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

5.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!

I read this, a tale of social climbing and dark secrets, when I was a teenager with a Farrah Fawcett poster Blu-Tacked to my bedroom wall.
I really must rediscover it, as I remember it as being so beautifully-written.

At the time, I derived some satisfaction in realising that the idle rich probably weren't all having an exhilarating time at their mansion parties, despite outward appearances.

Fitzgerald lifts the lid on the shallowness of the nouveau riche of 1920s' America.
My book had a photograph of a young Robert Redford on its cover, and so this is how I will forever imagine Jay Gatsby to look like.

And it's a timeless read; the author succeeded in creating a parable that will always be apposite (i.e. beware the vacuousness of aspiration for aspiration's sake).

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.

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."

Most Americans are assigned to read this novel in high school. Few American high schoolers have the wherewithal to appreciate this novel in full. I certainly did not. It is on a shortlist of novels that should, every 5 years starting at age 25, return to any American's required reading list.

First things first: The opening of The Great Gatsby -- its first 3-4 pages -- ranks among the best of any novel in the English language, and so too does its ending. Both for their content and for their prose, the latter of which is stunning and near perfect throughout the novel.

As for that between the novel's opening and conclusion, two things first. (1) History is fairly clear that the term "the American Dream" did not exist at the time Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, and regardless it almost certainly did not exist in the popular consciousness. (2) Few great American novelists after Fitzgerald have not attempted to write "the great American novel". Most of these efforts are absurdly long and often tortured. The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, is relatively short, fluid, and of seemingly effortless yet pristine expression. At a point in history where Fitzgerald's express focus could hardly have been a tale regarding "the American dream" per se or the writing of "the great American novel", Fitzgerald nevertheless crafts the definitive tale of "the American Dream", as well as, his successors' endeavors aside, "the great American novel". Period.

In not so many pages, Fitzgerald paints a brilliantly cogent picture of the potential pleasures, joys, and benefits an individual might deem achievable -- uniquely so -- in an America filled with possibilities. Paired with that picture, Fitzgerald besprinkles The Great Gatsby with the numerous pitfalls and evils that both stand as a barrier to what's imagined achievable in America, and threaten to accompany that which is achieved. Neither the quest for, nor (if possible) the achievement of, the American Dream is a thing untainted. Nor, in Fitzgerald's view, can it be.

Fitzgerald, frankly, writes all that need be written on this subject; whatever his successors' ambitions may be. And he writes it in prose so perfect, so impressive, and so beautiful, I occasionally find myself at a loss to name a novel in the English language constructed with greater skill, and apparent ease thereof.

In short: The Great Gatsby is an inimitable wonder of American fiction. And, for lack of a better word, an "application" of the English language that has few equals. The novel is astounding.

***2022
Re-read***

Enjoyed the book so much. The tragedy hit me bad

As clear a portrait of a generation as has ever been put to pen, and Fitzgerald has done even better by making much of the qualities of this novel timeless, shining a bright light on all that it right, and much that is wrong, with our society and our culture.

Complex, multi-layered, this is also subtle and simple - but subtle like a jazz movement, intricate in its performance and difficult to grasp all at once.

*** 2019 Reread - I watched the 2013 film and needed to revisit this wonderful book.

What Fitzgerald accomplished was to make a good story about lost love and dashed dreams a great story because it also paints a portrait of a time and place - the Roaring Twenties between the Great War and the Great Depression. From our vantage a hundred years later, we can see this as the eye of a hurricane, a gentle respite between calamities. But for the partygoers at Jay Gatsby’s place on West Egg, there was booze and music and laughter and a sense that this bacchanal might go on forever. But Fitzgerald, sensitive artist that he was, saw the chipping paint over the gaudy design, noticed the frayed edges of the party dresses and the fragile bubble about to burst.

Jay Gatsby can be the man of that time, optimistic and hopeful until the end, still chasing a dream that was only ever just that.

A very good story.