Written by: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by: Scribner
The Great Gatsby tells the story of super wealthy Jay Gatsby during the “most expensive orgy in history” and his obsession with winning the hand of the ravishing Daisy Buchanan. It is told primarily through the eyes of Daisy’s distant cousin, Nick Carraway, who is brought into the Jazz Age’s celebration of excess from a life of relatively abject poverty to draw the two long lost star-crossed lovers together and make a happy ending betwixt sheets woven of pure gold. The novel is considered one of the perennial works of American literature and has been studied by countless classrooms and scholars across the world, ostensibly laying much of the groundwork for generations of literary novelists to come.
Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. You have probably seen it on a shelf somewhere or heard that they made a movie about it that stars Leonardo DaVinci. As such, it is pretty much impossible to review this work without bias, either because of the work itself or the author himself. You’ve probably heard that it was a studious exercise in the furthest abstracts of human language, with punctuations purposely placed that caused a certain rhythm and flow to emerge within Fitzgerald’s elegant prose. You’ve probably heard that it was revisioned and revisioned and revisioned; you might have also heard that it didn’t make its deadline ultimately because of all of this obsessive revisionism. You’ve probably also heard Mr. F. was a raging alcoholic, and of all the true things I’ve said so far, this last point is the untruest.
The Great Gatsby is a work that arguably lives up to the greatness to which its author first envisioned. Every word, every passage, every action is carefully crafted to drive the story forward and no syllable is wasted on even the excessive celebrities in which it remarks. The weight of the narrator’s words, of Fitzgerald’s words, is calibrated precisely to draw you, the reader, into the magnificent world of 1920’s New York, to gape in wonder at the lavish exuberance, but also packs some pretty insightful knowledge re: the dangers of nostalgia; this idea that with the right amount of money and patience, even the most futile of lost destinies can be recovered and restored. After all, it’s easy to think that those we love are not simply stuck in some kind of bubble, preserved within the silence of time. That’s probably why getting back with your ex is a bad idea, so you should quit thinking about it. Read The Great Gatsby instead, and take some time to reflect on some of the stupid things you’ve done for love, and maybe put those stupid things behind you for good.
Choice Passages:
“he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward–and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”
“Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York–every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”
“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.”
ThomFiles 