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The Great Gatsby
  
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The Great Gatsby (Library Binding)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (813 customer reviews)

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Product Description

From Amazon.com

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



From AudioFile

Christopher Reeve's smooth rhythm and soft-spoken tone accentuate Fitzgerald's flowing, elegant style. Since his character is an onlooker to events which take place in Gatsby's glittering but superficial world, Reeve also projects an appropriate distant quality. However, his vocal attempts to make each character well-defined seem to be an overwhelming task for one reader. Occasionally, it is hard to tell which character is speaking. Nonetheless, Reeve's ability to accurately evoke the emotions of the characters transcends this flaw. As a result, he delivers a noteworthy performance. M.P.T. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty Much Perfect., Jan 15 2009
By Erin (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Paperback)
Fitzgerald's simple, elegant prose in this masterpiece is unmatched in terms of its beauty. The story is wonderful, the characters splendid. It's a love story, but it isn't a fluffy love story - it's ethereal, haunting, a little sobering, but that doesn't take away from its magic. An abolutely superb work.
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4.0 out of 5 stars The tragedy of a life unfulfilled, unloved and, ultimately, unlived!, Jul 4 2009
By Paul Weiss (Dundas, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Paperback)
"The Great Gatsby" is a sad book. But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that F Scott Fitzgerald's tragic, moving portrayal of the American Dream demonstrates that the typical American's pre-occupation with the yearning for wealth, class and an easier life can ultimately be so empty, so meaningless and so utterly unfulfilling.

When Nick Carraway left what he saw as a comfortable but mundane existence in the Midwest, he moved East to a magnetic New York City to learn the bond business. Renting a "weather beaten cardboard bungalow" in a town called West Egg on Long Island, he met a distant cousin, Daisy Buchanan; her husband, Tom, struggling to live up to the brilliance of a university football career in New Haven; and his next door neighbour, Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic man whose wealth had originated from mysterious means. The many rumours hinted at everything from Prohibition rum-running to murder.

The actual plot of the story, told through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, is so utterly pointless and virtually directionless as to leave the reader wondering how such simplistic, almost mindless melodrama manages to be so compelling and so captivating.

Nick tells the story of his move to New York City. We learn that Jay Gatsby had fallen in love with Daisy Buchanan several years earlier, at a time when he was an impoverished nobody and couldn't hope to marry someone like her. After Gatsby leaves to go to war, her subsequent marriage to Tom Buchanan is ultimately unsuccessful as Tom has an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a local mechanic. Jay Gatsy, now wealthy almost beyond imagining as a result of his involvement in criminal activities - the details of which are never fully disclosed in the story - asks Nick to re-connect him with his former love as he seeks to have Daisy admit that she had never stopped loving him since their first affair many years earlier. Gatsby desperately wants Daisy to confess she had never actually loved her husband at all.

The reader witnesses a non-stop whirl of debauchery as the shadowy Gatsby hosts an endless string of decadent, liquor-soaked bacchanales at his Long Island mansion. The readers are left to question Gatsby's motives as he is portrayed as an observer who never truly participates in his own parties. Indeed, the majority of his guests are clearly pretenders to his acquaintance and wannabe seekers of the trappings of wealth who have never even met their host and wouldn't know him to speak to him on the street.

The climax of the story arrives after a tragi-comic confrontational gathering of virtually the entire cast of Fitzgerald's tale - Tom and Daisy, Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and his erstwhile lover, tennis player Jordan Baker - sitting in a steamy, overheated, hotel room sipping on iced mint juleps casually discussing whether or not Daisy's future rests with Tom or with Gatsby.

The brim of the cup that is "The Great Gatsby" runneth over with licentiousness, hypocrisy, greed, amorality, false friendship and weak-kneed love - in other words, a veritable cocktail of moral turpitude to sip or swill and digest while pondering its base flavours plus a variety of notes and subtle overtones.

In hindsight, it is also worth considering the irony that, as a bond trader on Wall Street in 1925, Carraway would have had but a scant four years remaining before encountering the Wall Street Crash and the utter collapse of his fantastical New York world. Perhaps F Scott Fitzgerald was prescient as well as a brilliant writer who would have us take away the message that it might be worth a moment to reconsider the true meaning and value of every American's fondest "American Dream"!

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss
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5.0 out of 5 stars I prefer happy endings, but I still recommend this book ..., Jan 10 2007
By bel_78 "Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfa... (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Paperback)
A good plot plus an engaging writing style make a bestseller. Sometimes, those elements are combined with a third: the story makes us think about ourselves, and life in general. It's only then that we have a classic...

In my opinion, "The Great Gatsby" is just that, a classic. It was first published in 1925, an the author set the background of the story in the 1920's, the "Jazz Age". Disregarding the fact that particular period of history is already distant, this book has managed to mantain its edge.

But why does that happen?. The plot is interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary. It is the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor man who fell in love with a rich young girl named Daisy, who ended up getting married to someone who had as much money as her parents. All that happened before the beginning of the story, that starts quite a few years after that marriage. Daisy is quite unhappy (in a rather superficial way), and ready for a change when Gatsby enters again into her life, as good-looking as ever but with much more money.

The story is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, who is Daisy's cousin and who happens to meet Gatsby in one of the party the later organizes. Nick is a catalyst in the story, due to the fact that he puts Daisy and Jay in contact again after many years of separation. However, and more important, Carraway makes the book remarkably more interesting for the reader, making commentaries from time to time regarding what is happening. In the book, Nick says "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".

At the very least, Nick's role is an effective way that Fitzgerald found of involving the reader a little bit more in what's happening in the story. Most people can identify with Nick Carraway because he doesn't go to the extremes where the other characters permanently are. Gatsby, and his relentless persecution of a love that never was, that can end in nothing else that pure tragedy... And Daisy, so frivolous and vain, so thoroughly engrossed in herself that is incapable of true love...

All in all, I liked the story, but I especially enjoyed the way in which F. Scott Fitzgerald writes. His style is very simple, with only some metaphores that don't obscure the meaning but help to make it clear. He is also quite concise, as evident from the fact that this book has little more that 200 pages.

I think it is probably wortwhile to point out that what really makes this book a classic, instead of merely an enjoyable book (not that there is anything wrong with those!!), is the fact that it deals with many themes all of us deem important, for example love, dreams, lies, justice, social differences, hate, money and what it can (and cannot) buy...

From my point of view, this book is more than worth your time and money. I only wish the ending had been different... The book would have lost some of its dramatic air, but I would have been happier. Even though I know it is rather silly, I prefer happy endings. I hope you notice that despite that, I still recommend "The Great Gatsby" to you. I really don't have other choice, because it is really a great book :)

Belen Alcat
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 		 Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars a touch boring but otherwise amazing
This novel may have a bit of a negative association for many past and present American high schoolers, myself included (two decades ago), who were forced to read it. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Paul J. Fitzgerald

5.0 out of 5 stars Small but powerful book
By now, there's little dispute about "Gatsby" being the classic that it is. And if you're not a fan, if nothing else, you didn't have to invest a great amount of time... Read more
Published on Mar 28 2006 by Eric L. Neggilfan

5.0 out of 5 stars A rich story
"The Great Gatsby" is one of the most exquisite books I have ever read to date that deals with most if not all aspects of love and the challenges of life. Read more
Published on Jun 2 2005 by Monica

5.0 out of 5 stars Count your lucky stars
Gadzooks! This is one fine little book. No, it's not long, but the tale is tight and well told and quite unlike anything else in American literature. Read more
Published on May 22 2005 by Sharon Massey

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Gatsby's tale of love and life, the possibility of the moment realized and the crushing emptiness of a dream lost is so compelling that it continues to speak profoundly about the... Read more
Published on Mar 26 2005 by J. Alfred Damrosch

5.0 out of 5 stars A rich story
"The Great Gatsby" is one of the most exquisite books I have ever read to date that deals with most if not all aspects of love and the challenges of life. Read more
Published on Feb 27 2005 by Monica

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Gatsby is truly great!
The thing with reading classics (there's that word again) is that they really must be taken in the historical context they were created. Read more
Published on Jan 13 2005 by Bobby-Ray

5.0 out of 5 stars Required but still great
GREAT GATSBY was required reading this year, along with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and (for our advanced English class) McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD. Read more
Published on Sep 30 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Green Eyed Monster
F. Scott Fizgerald took inspiration from his wife Zelda. He wrote an essay that explains how the various colors relate both to her and to the important themes in his novels. Read more
Published on Jul 16 2004 by Sarah Sammis

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Writing!
There is some of the BEST writing that I've ever come across in this classic American novel. It isn't an inspiring story by any means, but it is well written and illuminating... Read more
Published on Jul 16 2004 by G. Grisham

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