Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summary: In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write “something new–something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald’s finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning–” Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It’s also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means–and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel’s more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy’s patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.
[Setting: Me at page 90]
Here I am, sitting exactly halfway through The Great Gatsby, and I literally have no idea what to say about it. I mean, at one point, I was falling asleep reading this! Not my finest hour..
Anyway, I’m not sure how this review is going to come out, if it can even be called a review. I guess I’ll get back to the book now -.-
I was thinking about not posting this review, but I decided to post it because I now have a few things to say about The Great Gatsby.
I thought the narration was extremely boring. And the “romance” was also bland.
Gatsby was a proud man. And a liar.
At first, nothing about this book was memorable, but it really kicked off after page 100.
This book was odd…
It did get more interesting, and I especially liked the drama at the end between Tom and Gatsby was really exciting.
If I had to choose, my favorite characters would be Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway. Hoorah!
2.5/5 stars. I’m so glad to be done with this.