The 'Good' Gatsby
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This is a very good book. But let's not get carried away, just because it is often one of the few books we have studied:It isn't great.'Heart of Darkness',puts it in the shade.....Tolstoy and Proust and soooo many others put it's status into perspective. But, still, it's certainly worth a read, like I said, it's a good book. Very good. It's just NOT great.
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A BRILLIANT BOOK - SKIP THE INTRODUCTION!
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This edition has an introduction half as long as the book - skim it at the end if you wish but don`t read it first - it`s a fine example of someone showing off their cleverness without illuminating the work they wish to praise. The Great Gatsby is superbly written with great economy and consumate style - none of the characters are likeable - all have cheated in some way or been cheated upon. It`s a novel which haunts you long after you have read it.
Mick Drake author of the comic novel All`s Well at Wellwithoute.
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The Great Gatbsy
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The Great Gatsby is a beautifully written book. Perhaps its greatest strength lies in the sheer magic of the writing. Fitzgerald spins sentences of such wonder, such clarity and honesty, that we are left to do nothing else but shake our head in amazement. Jay Gatsby may be a great mystery, he may be the Great American Dream personified, but if he sparkles, then the novel itself shines.
Nick Carraway has decided, at twenty-nine to 'go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.' By chance, he finds a cheap house, a 'weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month' that is nestled amongst the huge mansions of the rich. He doesn't know it to begin with, but he is neighbours with Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby.
Gatsby holds parties on the weekends, grand affairs of cocktails and party dresses, his house filled to the rafters with people, some invited, most not. He is endlessly hospitable, allowing his alcohol to be drunk, his food to be consumed, his pool, his books, his home - they are open to his guests. Guests, not friends.
He is a mystery. Nobody knows why he has these parties, though everyone attends. Just as nobody knows how he made his money, or who he really is. Gatsby, when he enters Nick's world, refers to him and everyone as 'old sport', a distancing technique that is prevalent throughout the novel. 'It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.'
But he is not completely unknowable, though the romantic beliefs about him are accurately held. No, Gatsby is more and less than the stories that surround him. He is in love, his mansion lies directly across from that of Nick's cousin, Daisy, an old flame he cannot let go. At her jetty a green light winks across the water, and it is this that Gatsby watches on lonely nights, nights which are filled with people who mean nothing, or nights he spends alone.
Gatsby is mysterious and alluring while he remains unknown. When his love for Daisy is revealed, he becomes more known and less ethereal, his character growing from an enigma into a person. It adds warmth and humility to his personality, and is something beautiful. 'He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.'
But it is when Daisy 'becomes his' that Gatsby's character loses its shine and lowers to the ground. He is now a normal man, with the same strengths and weaknesses as everyone else. Perhaps there are more weaknesses - it is hard to consider cuckolding Tom Buchanan an admirable quality. Gatsby represents the dull, ordinary routine of a dream realised, that failed glow of actualised fantasy.
Nick's presence in the story has its own plot, but it runs adjacent to Gatsby. Perhaps Fitzgerald's greatest inspiration was to make Nick a 'supposer', to remove Gatsby from the immediacy of intimate narration and make him the refracted imaginings of Nick. 'I am one of the few honest people I have ever known', Nick says of himself. But Gatsby isn't honest, so how can an honest man understand someone's whose life is built on fantasy and deceit? More importantly, can an honest man understand someone who exists - has created himself - out of a love that has fallen into the past? He can't, which is what makes Gatsby, and Nick, so interesting.
Gatsby's love lies in the past. Fitzgerald refrains from sentimentalizing Gatsby as a younger man, but it is evident from the text that the sadness of his - our? - lives comes from an unwillingness to leave the past and live for today, or better yet, the future. Gatsby is sad and melancholy, a friendless man who wants a friend, an unloved man who wants to be loved. But can a man who only looks backward expect love or friendship in people that necessarily live in the now? He can expect it, but it won't happen. Romantic, yes. Fulfilled, never.
Fitzgerald's writing is beautiful, both understated and grandiose, mellifluous in its gentle rhythms. 'On the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of nonolfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.'
It is worth noting the quality of Tony Tanner's introduction in the Penguin Classic edition. He goes to some length to show that part of what makes The Great Gatsby such 'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel' is what Fitzgerald cut out of the piece, not so much what he left in. He analyses passages in the first draft and their remains in the completed piece - it becomes clear that Gatsby can survive only as a mystery, with as little exposition as possible. So many times, what Fitzgerald cut was explanatory dialogue or comments from Gatsby, which would have dramatically weakened the piece. We cannot and should not know Gatsby, even when he becomes 'known' and explained by the text. He must remain a cipher, such that we can impress upon his impressionable facade anything at all that we wish. I say facade, because we cannot probe deeper into what Gatsby is. The Great American dream? Perhaps - but what is he, even with that? He's a mystery, and so is the dream.
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The merging of beauty and brutality
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Fitzgerald's prose is at times both lyrical and truely vital. I could feel the heat of New York City baking on me as I read this novel, as I could taste the mint juleps and visualise Gatsby's lavish parties. What is most striking about Fitzgerald's writing is the way he managed to encapsulate the heady lifestyles of the rich and beautiful in all their subtle brutality. While beauty is only skin deep, violence lingers and bubbles below the surface. This is a seminal piece of literature that is just as telling for what it leaves out as it is for what it includes. The often mysoginstic treatment of women and the blatant absence of black people highlight the era of contrasts and divisions of equality epitomised in 1920s America. The era as evoked by Fitzgerald is one both on the cusp of sexual change not yet fully realised, and stagnated cruelty and double standards. Do not read this expecting a happy ending this is very much an exploration of the demise of the so called 'American Dream'.
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Lyrical in a less than lyrical century
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Nobody writes prose like F Scott Fitzgerald. Lyrical in a less than lyrical century, Scott Fitzgerald tends to be pigeonholed as the most prominent commentator on the Jazz Age, that brief hurrah after the guns fell silent but before the Wall Street Crash. But the sheer precision and elegance of his writing has a timeless quality which deserves greater attention, and his preoccupations in The Great Gatsby - wrecked love, the nature of America - are hardly themes exclusive to the 1920s.
For my money, The Great Gatsby is one of the most successful and rewarding novels of the twentieth century. The Penguin blurb suggesting he was `something of a seer' diminishes with its vague mysticism Scott Fitzgerald's complete grasp of his craft. For instance, The Great Gatsby is cleverly structured; its subject, who dominates the narrative, only appears for the first time 50 pages in (the novel's less than 200 pages all told) - Scott Fitzgerald knows how to hold back, build suspense and carefully pace his story. The shocking ending, when it comes, is also somehow inevitable - it's been lovingly prepared for, for Scott Fitzgerald is a good professional storyteller as much as a spellbinding writer of prose.
And it's probably the prose itself that most captivates. Scott Fitzgerald simply puts words together beautifully - in an unexpected, highly articulate way. He favours double barrelled adjectives, often choosing contradictions that make sense despite themselves: `his gorgeous pink rag of a suit'; `she spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice'. Occasionally he wants to fit so much in, or read so much into a situation or character, that he's just a little too intense to convince - but the occasional excess of imagination is a pretty bearable flaw in an author. The characterisation is thoughtfully worked too - even minor characters are vivid.
Last but not least, the novel has profound things to say about America - then and now. Such as what success or integrity means, how to achieve those things and how society regards each of them; the Big Brother of commerce, in the form of the eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg; and the different cultures in the US, most particularly those from the MidWest versus `Easterners'.
Readers may get something out of following The Great Gatsby with Breakfast at Tiffany's - another short, beautifully written New York novel with a beguiling central character.
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