The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby
List Price: $14.00
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Book Summary Information

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-30
ISBN: 0743273567
Number of pages: 180
Publisher: Scribner
Product features: Accessories:

Book Reviews of The Great Gatsby

Book Review: A terrible story horribly told
Summary: 1 Stars

I forced myself through this poor excuse for sewage once in high school, and I hated it. With great passion.

About five years later, I subjected myself to its crapulence again, because a friend kept saying I ought to give it another chance, and I happen to believe that there may in fact be second acts in American lives.

Same result. The book is called "The Great Gatsby." But instead of writing from Gatsby's or an omniscient viewpoint, Fitzgerald has Nick Carraway do the narrating. Frankly, the title character from Grey's Anatomy would've been a better choice. And she's awfulness incarnate.

Carraway--boring, feckless, inconsequential, turgid Carraway--he's only one problem. A much greater flaw in the book is that Jay Gatsby and his shenanigans would not be interesting or edifying in the least even if Dante were telling his story.

Now, I'm not giving anything away by saying that the upshot of the book is that Gatsby wastes his life.

Please, do yourself a favor and don't let him waste even a moment of yours.

Summary of The Great Gatsby

Noted Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli draws upon years of research to present the Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance exactly as he intended according to the original manuscript, revisions, and corrections--with explanatory notes. Reprint.
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + 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.

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