Customer Reviews

The Great Gatsby

5 star:		(477)
4 star:		(176)
3 star:		(66)
2 star:		(40)
1 star:		(55)

 

 

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.

This book is a perfect example why kids don't like to read or find it boring. I read this in high school and was turned off by books.

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 inthe book, for it is not long. But the character of Jay Gatsby is quite unique. Jay Gatsby loves without judgment, without conquest or need. The sad irony is that the object of such noble sentiment is a shallow yet benign Daisy, a lethargic, bored, and wealthy philistine. Gatsby is not a wise hero, otherwise this novel would be pedantic and obvious. Gatsby shares the shallowness of modern society, and its belief system of material possession. Gatsby is, simply put, 'unaffected', pure, a blind unabashed dreamer. Jay and his friends, all rather crass and shallow except for our narrator and moral moderator, Nick Calloway, go back and forth between cocktail parties, driving under T.J Eckleberg's Eyes, an abandoned billboard optometry advertisement. Themes of T.S. Eliot's hauntingly prophetic Wasteland are echoed. When a drunken night of obliviousness ends in the death of Tom Buchanan's (a fierce egoist and staunch 'realist') mistress, the moral fiber of all those involved break down, and finger's begin to twitch and point.This book is jam-packed with insight about not only the 1920s, but the human condition in general. Filled with metaphors and poetic writing, Fitzgerald has given us one remarkable piece of literature for the ages.

KATZENJAMMER by Jackson McCrae and CATCHER IN THE RYE by Salinger

I fail to see why this book is such a literary rave. It's the story about spoiled rich people with no meaning to their lives. If this is the best of the author's works, I won't read any more of his books. There are too many truly good books in the library.

Fitzgerald did not create a masterpiece with this horrifying wonder of modern literature. In the story his over use of meaningless description and verbosity indicates to the reader that he was trying too hard, and it would be unrealistic to believe that this is a natural voice. As an example of writing style, I would expect it from someone in grade 6, with a dictionary. The sentences are basic and blunt, and interspersed with horrendously redundant words that were probably put there to make the author look smart, since they were more than 5 letters long of course!. If the author was alive, I would suggest he re-write the story without the blatant attempt at Dickens verbosity and write it in an actual voice that is readable and consistent.

"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

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 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. There is so much to learn especially for us in this modern world where so many people use the word "love" without really knowing what it truly means. The author is so descriptive that I sometimes felt as if I was in the story. He made it easy for readers to penetrate the souls of the characters and relate to their lives.

The character development is prodigious, while prose is outstanding. I felt as much for Gatsby as I have for any other character. He had always had high aspirations, but his dreams were taken away from him by the fact the he had to fight a war, and he could never be the same again. Gatsby's ambition is to have his former love, who is now married to an unfaithful husband, a quest that saw outstanding twist and turns in the story to make it the great read we have heard so much about. This book is truly inspirational for everyone irrespective of race, gender, age or occupation.Recommended stories are DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE, THE USURPER AND OTHERS, THE SCARLET LETTER, WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, in the sense that they go to add to this rich theme

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. Only a few books come to mind with regards to the "knock me out" kind. McCrae's "Children's Corner" is one such book, as is Steinbeck's "East of Eden." Other than that, there aren't a great deal. But "Gatsby" is at the top of the heap and probably will be for the next hundred years. There have been two movies made of this book (that I know of), and both are excellent. Don't be put off if you HAD to read this in school. Try it out again as it really IS a classic.

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 volatile experience of being both human and American in a world that is increasingly doing its level best to lure us away from the simpler selves we mean to inhabit. There are other themes and topics in Gatsby: greed, corruption, the Jazz Age, the American Dream gone sadly off course. But the compelling message of Gatsby is the romanticism within us all - that there is an incorruptible truth out there somewhere, if only we can maintain the focus to seek it out and the courage to embrace it when we stumble across its path. To read Gatsby is to rediscover the lyricism of the English language, enjoy a good story and be admonished to stay true to our dreams. If you're looking for another great book, try McCrae's "Children's Corner" with its jaw-dropping scenes and great writing style. Can't go wrong with that one OR Gatsby.