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Amazon.com Review
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certa 0
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Amazon.com Review
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.
"Fitzgerald wrote the novel under many titles, including Incident at West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; The Journals of Nick Carraway; On the Road to West Egg; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover.
For publication, Fitzgerald seriously considered Trimalchio in West Egg. Like Gatsby in the novel, Trimalchio, a character in Petronius's Satyricon, is a parvenu known for his lavish, orgiastic parties. But Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, and editor, Max"
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Nick Carraway is Gay.
The aforementioned Greg Olear convinced us on two points — first, the way Carraway describes female characters as opposed to male characters (the latter with much more passion and attention to physicality than the former), and second, that scene with Mr. McKee, which, now that we re-read it, can only be a hook-up. What’s interesting to us about this revelation is this: if the Gatsby we know has been being viewed this whole time by someone who is head over heels "
m08221196 added this to a list 4 months, 1 week ago
"I hated it!
I shouldn't have bothered finishing it till the end, but I did. I should have just skipped it and read the relevant notes online.
The characters were ridiculous and unlikable. The events were not gripping and the style not to my taste.
I honestly could not see why everyone else liked it.
This is the only novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald I have ever read and I didn't like it at all.
I can't judge an author after reading only one novel of his so I'm willing to give it a try an"
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