The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | a touch boring but otherwise amazing

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The Great Gatsby

	The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald Scribner, 1999 - 180 pages average customer review:based on 1117 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Book

I use this book as a college student for the course of "Critical Thinking Skill" . Easy to follow and to understand.

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. And it is a touch boring. But other than that it's a great book, especially considering that the author was only 29 years old when it was published. It flawlessly captures the excesses of the roaring 1920s in the Hamptons of Long Island, through a group of characters who are each distinct and not easy to forget. The description of the wasteland surrounding the shop of the mechanic, George Wilson, is a very interesting way to contrast the lavishness of the Hamptons. And there actually is a fair amount of action in the plot that intensifies the psychological aspects of the story. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

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Better the 10th Time Around

I first read The Great Gatsby as a summer reading assignment for 10th grade English class. I was on vacation at the Jersey shore, and, as I lay in bed in the evenings, sunburnt and calm after swimming in the ocean all day, I discovered a thrilling new world. The world of seductive glamour and heartbreaking tragedy. The story has stayed with me, more than 30 years later. I've re-read Gatsby many times, and have thought about it throughout my life. The words of Nick Carroway, the narrator, who tells us the wisdom his father imparted to him as a child...basically to never forget the advantages you were born with, and that there are others who were not born so lucky. This is the story of America. It is also the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was the not-so-rich, not so aristocratic, lover of rich girls and aristocrats. He lived in the world of the very rich, and heard the money tinkling in the voices of the rich girls he met in prep school, and then at the Princeton dances. These are the girls that melded into his greatest heroine (or, perhaps, anti-heroine) Daisy Buchanan. Daisy lives on the the top of the heap of all of the Fitzgerald girls. Well, perhaps just a notch underneath Zelda, the real-life Mrs. Fitzgerald. Gatsby was the beginning of an obsession for me. I went on to read everything by and about Fitzgerald. One of the most exciting parts of my first visit to Paris at age 18 was discovering a collection of his short stories that had never been collected in book form. In college, I spent many evenings browsing the stacks of the BU library reading the biographies of FSF. Although all of his stories provided enjoyment, and I would recommend them all to any budding romantics out there, it is Gatsby which is closest to perfection. So many wondrous details. I believe they called it "A Novel WIthout a Hero." But Gatsby is the hero, because he dared to believe that he could re-capture the first rush of young love. It's like capturing a falling star in a milk bottle. And it's something we all long for. To keep the magic of first experience. The act of reading this novel for the first time is an act of magic. Do not pass it up.

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blink and you'll miss the storyline

The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic story of
Jazz-Age lovers who dwell in materialism, snobbery, elitism
and racism before it all comes crashing down on them and their
rich friends. Ironically, the story is written roughly about
five years before the Great Depression, which shows how
visionary Fitzgerald was.

Even today, the themes that Fitzgerald tackles in the book
still resonates. The ONLY reason why I'm giving this book four
stars and not five is because it doesn't really pick up until
about pg. 75, after which I finally understood how and why the
characters were reacting to each other the way they were.
If the first five chapters don't bore you to death, you
should come to enjoy the book, which definitely gets better at the end.

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THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And so we revisit the official novel of high school English, the only F. Scott Fitzgerald most people will ever read. Does it live up to the hype? It's in the highest category of literature where no book can.

The novel concerns a number of extremely rich people, all of whom feel unloved and all of whom are unfulfilled. Through the eyes of Nick Carraway, the main character, we see these characters' destruction like a slow-motion, 180-page train wreck. To a limited degree, the reader is also sucked into this amoral morass.

I also note that there are some obvious similarities in the endings between this book and Sunset Boulevard, which was of course written later.

Fitzgerald was unquestionably a talented writer, and quite often his imagery and metaphors are excellent. However, here and there the reader gets the feeling that he's trying too hard, as sentences and phrases come across as stilted or contrived.

So what does The Great Gatsby do for us today? No real redemption occurs here for any of the characters (this is different from a happy ending; I'm not complaining because it doesn't have a happy ending). Certainly it is a cautionary tale against materialism, but no hope is ever presented for any of the characters.

I wanted to bump this to 4 stars/recommended, but I couldn't in good conscience do it.

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT

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