Customer Reviews

Great Gatsby

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2 star:		(43)
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I think, or I glean, that American high school students are required to read this book, held up as a shining example of national literature. Perhaps because I’m not American, this novel wasn’t on any lists when I studied English in high school and university. Just as well; I mightn’t have appreciated it then.

It’s understandable that The Great Gatsby would be taught; it’s damned good. It’s tight, compact, linear, and practically every sentence is a work of art. I bought the audio book and listened to it twice. Then I picked up the novel and read it in a couple of days. It’s excellent; there’s no way around it. It’s also rather different from Tender is the Night, also good, perhaps more evolved, but not nearly as flash or impactful.

If someone employed Fitzgerald’s style today, their prose would likely be labeled too ornate. A shame, because it’s poetic and powerfully descriptive.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

"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

this was very good reading and I enjoyed it very much. I recommend it to anyone interested in an American classic

As a reader, I gravitate more towards sci-fi/adventure novels, usually written more recently than this book was. But I knew I should read it, for I knew it was a staple of every library. So I picked the book up with low expectations, and boy, did it prove me wrong.
The writing is just great, and the book is a page turner, with only the power of relationships, backstory, and tension to keep the reader on the edge of their seats. I never thought I could be so riveted by a simple conversation. The fact is that this book has so many layers, with every line, and every conversation. It is a truly great book, worthy of all its critical acclaim. For someone looking into delving into the literary genre, or just someone who hasn't experienced many books from behind their time, this is a really great novel to read, and it's truly absorbing.

Nobody can drop it like Fitzgerald - he truly is an original. 'The Great Gatsby' is proof.

We start out with a reflective Nick Carraway (great last name, by the way), as he tries to sort out a summer experience where he met the infamous Jay Gatsby. Time and again we're shown Gatsby as he partakes in the party life of the Jazz Era, only we're not shown Gatsby. He eludes readers until the final two chapters of the novel. Fitzgerald structures the book by withholding the precious details until the very end. Why does he? Because he wanted to write one of the great pieces of prose in Twentieth Century literature, and he succeeded.

Repetitions characterize a lot of what goes on in the book. Really, the plot isn't so much captivating as is Fitzgerald's writing. It's beautiful. And you'll love it even more for getting to meet Daisy, Tom and others in such a classic way.

I recommend 'The Great Gatsby' to everyone--looking into the Twentieth Century could never have been better!

This book shipped on time, it was in perfect condition
and is gorgeous in itself. I love the feel of the book
and up to now, the story is great for anyone interested in
1920s New York socialites.

The story of Jay Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway. Carraway had graduated from New Haven in 1915, had participated in the Great War and, returning restless, decided to move East and learn the bond business. In the spring of 1922, he rents a house in West Egg, Long Island next to the mansion of Gatsby - a mysterious host of large and extravagant parties.
It seems that few people know anything about Gatsby, so speculation is rife. Gatsby is wealthy and powerful, and knows how to get things done. And yet, while many flock to his parties, he seems to have no friends, only business associates. A man of mystery.

Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, is Daisy Buchanan. Daisy and Tom (and their daughter Pammy) live on the more fashionable East Egg side of Long Island. Nick had met her husband Tom at New Haven and Nick calls on them soon after moving to West Egg. During his visit, Nick also meets Jordan Baker who tells him that Tom has a mistress, and finds that here as well that Gatsby, his parties and his wealth are a topic of discussion. There is a lot of restless energy here, as well as a sense of dissatisfaction, of boredom and of wanting more from life.
Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress, lives with her husband Tom near an expanse of land known as the Valley of Ashes. A wasteland of sorts, between New York and Long Island, constantly under the view of an advertisement for an oculist.

`But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.'

Through Nick and Jordan, Daisy is reintroduced to Gatsby. She had been engaged to him before her marriage to Tom, back when he had no money. Gatsby still loves Daisy, and hopes to recapture this past romance.

``Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. `Why of course you can.''

Unfortunately, for Jay Gatsby, he cannot repeat the past. And a series of unfortunate coincidences and tragedies obliterate his future as well as that of the Wilsons. It's of no consequence to Tom and Daisy, the destruction that they cause and retreat from. They live in and for the moment, without loyalty and without care.

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

`Her voice is full of money', he said suddenly.' And money talks in this novel, but it has to be the `right' sort of `old' money. There is no place for a parvenu like Gatsby, and there are few mourners at his funeral.

It's been forty years since I last read this novel, and while I remembered the story fairly well, it had a different impact this time around. The first time around I wondered how people could be so fickle and shallow, this time I was more focussed on how Fitzgerald manages to complete such an unsettling story within fewer than 150 pages. All versions of the early 20th century American Dream portrayed in this book are flawed: those who can see the flaws can do nothing and those who strive to live it are doomed to fail. Equality is not realisable.

And if I read it again? Who knows what I'll think of it.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

i can't believe i have never read this story before-i read it because of another book called "the Paris Wife"
all i can say is i'm hooked on F.SF and Hemingway now-not only on their books but on their lives as well
this book is amazing

the book is cheaply bound out of cheap materials, I love this book, i'm not questioning the ideological content of the book but the material base that makes the physical copy of this book is low quality.

I suggest going to a local bookstore and get a hardcover copy with hi quai paper that will last longer. unless you really don't care and just want a quick fix to read the book! in that case I would suggest going online and downloading a free pdf (Which is easily available), or, if you don't like reading so much on screens, go to a used bookstore and get a copy for like $6 rather than like $20.

reserving judgement is a matter of infinite hope.

Didn't like the story, the way the book was written, or the lame dialogue. It's a short novel with little substance.