The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.55 You Save: $7.45 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.60 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Great Gatsby
Book Review: A classic masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby, when I was in high school. I was captivated by the lush, lyrical prose that was such a distinctive characteristic of the novel. I think that Fitzgerald has given us a searing, powerful take on the rich dilettantes of the 1920's. He slowly and skillfully reveals the shallowness and callousness of these people, as they manipulate and deceive everyone. It seems that Fitzgerald's heroines were always reincarnations of his real wife, Zelda. It is clear that Gatsby has hopelessly romanticized the superficial and hollow Daisy Buchanan. He has elevated her to a pedestal that she does not in any way deserve. Yet he is determined to pursue her and his dreams, at all costs.
Fitzgerald is unmatched when it comes to character studies. He has used his own real life experience among the elite, to peel away the beautiful artifice and show us the truly ugly, heartless soul inside these people. Daisy and Tom are unhappy and unfulfilled people. Tom uses Myrtle to escape from the boredom and inanity of Daisy. He could care less if it all turns out badly. Consequences, morality and decency are not qualities that one finds in the likes of Tom and Daisy. They take what they want and try to steal moments of happiness at the expense of the humanity of those who are manipulated and played like chess pieces. Life is a game to them, a game to be played out in grand style and if someone gets crushed in the process, so be it.
Fitzgerald finds his own voice in his narrator, the conscientious and astute Nick Carraway. He is the observer, watching the carnage and emotional wreckage unfold before his eyes. Through him, we see the horror of what Tom and Daisy do to those who have the misfortune to those who cross their path. Initially, Nick is enchanted to be in their company, but by the end as he surveys the tragedy and destruction that has been wrought, he is repelled and wants only to put as much distance as he can between himself and these monsters. Fitzgerald's own ideas and thoughts are expressed through Nick. It's a masterful way of illuminating the reader. Nick is the moral compass in this novel. He sees the truth, the ugly reality of what makes up the rich and famous, their lack of character, their emptiness, their need to lose themselves. In the end we feel the way he does. The beauty and lavishness of the lives of these people are just a brittle exterior, covering up the hideousness that lies underneath.
As I read this novel again, years later and much older, it has taken on a whole other dimension. I have enough life experience now to truly appreciate the dark and sinister reality that can lie behind beauty and wealth. It is now a richer experience, because Fitzgerald's novel is timeless. He provided a stinging, harsh critique of the kind of people he knew all too well, of an era, a time in which people satisfied their greediness at the expense of others. The book can never become outdated, because what it says about people who have too much money and time on their hands with too little humanity, applies to generations through the years.
This is a seminal work, a beautifully crafted tale about a time that was captured forever in these richly drawn characters. Fitzgerald had the most distinctive style of writing I have ever experienced. No one else has ever even come close to his genius. He can dissect and carve out the essence of his characters using the most lovely prose. His descriptive phrases still leave me breathless. I am only sorry that he died prematurely in 1940 at the too young age of 44, thereby depriving us of the privilege of reading more of his magnificent writing. We must make do with what he was able to give us in the brief time he was on this earth.
Book Review: what i thought of this book....
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first start reading chapter one and two I wanted to give up reading the book because I couldn't understand what the author was talking about. When he said "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had" and "In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores." I didn't understand it until later. It means that it's not wise to judge people by the looks because sometimes you might misunderstand that person and create some problems. However, I think the story was mainly about how wealth, popularity, love, loss, betrayal and emptiness. The whole story is kind of depressing because two of the characters die. Everyone's life is depended on money but nothing else. People tend to care about money than the social problems between groups of people. There is a social problem that caused through many years. People divide themselves in to three groups, high class, mid class and low class. If you're not very wealthy, people would just ignore you but when your fairly rich people would remember your name. If your like some millinery person than you become famous. Someone of the chapters' mood changes by the weather. For example, when Nick invites Daisy to his house and have cup of tea, Gatsby feels all nervous which then the weather changes to cloudy and rainy but when Gatsby was satisfied the weather becomes sunny. Even though it's depressing I would recommend other people to read it, which that is who haven't read this book yet. How the author describes things are great, you can feel what the author is going through. It feels like you were there in the past. When I first start reading chapter one and two I wanted to give up reading the book because I couldn't understand what the author was talking about. When he said "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had" and "In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores." I didn't understand it until later. It means that it's not wise to judge people by the looks because sometimes you might misunderstand that person and create some problems. All the characters live in wealth and having relationship problems with each other. For example Daisy and Gatsby. Gatsby is madly in love with Daisy and want have a life together but Daisy is already married. But the story ends tragically.
However, I think the story was mainly about how wealth, popularity, love, loss, betrayal and emptiness. The whole story is kind of depressing and exciting as you read along. Everyone's life is depended on money but nothing else. People tend to care about money than the social problems between groups of people. There is a social problem that caused through many years. People divide themselves in to three groups, high class, mid class and low class. If you're not very wealthy, people would just ignore you but when your fairly rich people would remember your name. If your like some millinery person than you become famous. Someone of the chapters' mood changes by the weather. For example, when Nick invites Daisy to his house and have cup of tea, Gatsby feels all nervous which then the weather changes to cloudy and rainy but when Gatsby was satisfied the weather becomes sunny.
Even though it's depressing I would recommend other people to read it, which that is who haven't read this book yet. How the author describes things are great, you can feel what the author is going through. It feels like you were there in the past.
Book Review: Not the Great American Novel
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, I admit, I am let down. I concede that I am rating this from a scale of expectations; and on that scale, its rates only an okay. Like many, from time to time, I go back and pick up a "classic" to see what it is I missed the first time around. I was without a new read this particular weekend and picked up "The Great Gatsby" off of my daughter's required reading shelf of books from high school.
Well, in comparison to other such deservedly vaunted works ("Moby Dick" is my second favorite book in a lifetime on such a re-reading), this one did not measure up. It was not just the ennui (although it was primarily that) that seemed to envelop one and all the characters (sparing only Nick, who I am guessing was the author's own self reflecting on his world), there also seemed to be evidence of an odd lack of discipline in spots. There were a couple of passages where the author seemed to have forgotten in whose voice he was speaking. In others, time and space are confused.
(And, its only a minor complaint that Fitzgerald can't seem to stop using the work "murmur" to describe virtually every other audible utterance. Was this intentional?; I am not sure but it did strike me a bit lazy).
But my biggest complaint was the lack of any inspirational bottom. Perhaps, indeed this was Fitzgerald's own experience, and I would have to guess in many ways it must have been. But while I have read many a novel full of misanthropes and other desperate souls, this is one of the few that are thought of as "great" in which virtually everyone seems to be lost or desperate, or, as to most of them, just so plain self-orbital, that one is left without some glimmer of hope. On reflection, aside from the pitiable Mr. Wilson, Jordan Baker (despite her tendency to lie and cheat) was perhaps the only character that elicited genuine empathy at the end of things- an insecure soul who had allowed herself to be finally vulnerable to her feelings for Nick only to be let down by his withdrawal from her, and he retretaed from the ennui of the East. Only she seemed "human" in a way that one could understand or tolerate.
A friend once laughed at me for describing Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" as a hopeful novel. Yet despite a post-apocalyptic world full of survivalist desperation, there was at its core a message of the hope of delivering a next generation into a world with the faintest glimmer of new awakening in it. In Gatsby, in contrast, the only child in the novel is revealed briefly as an ornament for her mother's parlor gathering, and then ushered away for her parents to get on with the party. And, the author ends the book with a despairing description of human hope as being washed away with the sands of time.
I have to admit Fitzgerald could set a stage for dramatic, and sometimes emotionally gripping moments, although the scenes sometimes (too often it seemed) bordered on melodrama. The characters, were, for the most part, richly rendered and he was able, at times, to make them make me laugh. Indeed, the symbolism of the settings he described was wonderfully rendered. In these respects, I can admire the flourish of his writing.
And as for my disappointment with the substance, that may well have been the product of a gifted writer (and that much is clear) working in that gilded age after the Industrial Revolution and before the Great Depression.
BUT,"the great American novel" (of which there are many) should some, for this reader, offer some source of inspiration or at least enlightenment. In the end, this exquisitely written book left me feeling empty in the way that its well sated characters did after their summer season's tragic end.
Book Review: Ornate and Spare
Summary: 5 Stars
If a novel can be both ornate and spare, The Great Gatsby is that and more. It is a book history buffs might enjoy as much as those seeking simple entertainment, because Fitzgerald set out to write a story of the times in which he lived--The Roaring Twenties. Accuracy in contemporaneous fiction is challenging, because historical elements were included, such as the World Series debacle of 1919, and everyone's a critic!
Fitzgerald sought to make it an extraordinary work, only part of which he accomplished by sketching a larger than life character, Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald's first novel was published when he was only 24, still wet with a commitment to excellence that is available only to the young--not that more mature souls aren't allowed excellence, but no one has it in his or her own mind as much as those who've been less knocked about by sorrow, misfortune or tedium.
"The Authorized Text" adds to the pleasure of reading, because Bruccoli presents some of Fitzgerald's own words on the novel as well as on writing in general, such as "An author ought to write for the youth of his generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." Two out of three isn't bad. The youth of his generation were too busy living the life Fitzgerald described to be bothered with reading about it.
This version also opens a peephole to common paperback publishing by tracing some of the errors that crept into the work over time. Corrections were made by comparing various editions to the galleys, which contained Fitzgerald's hand-written edits and rewrites, some of them notably more difficult to decipher than others, yet vast improvements to an already splendid tale.
Finally, two more points stand out from reading this authorized edition. Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins (Scribners), absolutely gushed over the manuscript, "I think the novel is a wonder." As effusive as Perkins was, he was not totally so. "You are right in feeling there is a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven..." and "Gatsby is somewhat vague." Perkins went on for pages about Fitzgerald's treatment of Gatsby and his wealth, simultaneously accusing the author of saying too little and too much. Bruccoli calls Perkins a genius, so his critique may in fact be brilliant. Even so, they're both talking about the greatest book of one of the greatest writers of all time. All writers should take heart. The ONLY THING THAT COUNTS: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence
Gatsby was a legend in his time. Only in his own mind? He did, after all, make himself up as Fitzgerald squeezed him out of his pen. And part of the greatness lies somewhere between knowing what is true and what we only wish were so. In Fitzgerald's own words, "That's the whole burden of this novel--the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory."
For me, "the magical glory" showed itself by racing me to the next page, though I wanted to linger over the words, and then too soon I finished the race, and there was no more Great Gatsby to read. (F. Scott Fitzgerald won.)
Book Review: Fitzgerald's Great Masterpiece
Summary: 3 Stars
Although F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that his 1925 novel in titled The Great Gatsby was to be his "greatest masterpiece", in the opinion of at least one reader the book fell disappointingly short of his highly optimistic, and probably unrealistic, expectations. The Great Gatsby is often heralded as one of the "great" and "exemplary" literary works in American history, but in my opinion as a reader it is simply flawed and uninteresting. And even though my opinion may not fall into the category of mainstream sentiment towards the novel, take it as a viewpoint less explored, yet still like any other, valid nonetheless.
I had no prior knowledge regarding The Great Gatsby prior to its introduction into my American Literature II class, but after seeing that it had received a vast amount of rave reviews as well as learning about its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I must admit I was intrigued by the prospect of a novel with lust, romance, friendships, lies among many other interesting occurrences. Fitzgerald commences his "masterpiece" in a very descriptive manner, at times overwhelmingly descriptive, by introducing to the reader his narrator Nick Carraway. Nick seems to be an honest and trustworthy narrator throughout the course novel, but in my opinion he refuses to speak of the harsh realities of life to Jay Gatsby, a person who he considers his friend. Nick is very observant and descriptive, qualities essential to any successful narrator of a novel, but at times, Fitzgerald goes over board allowing Nick to ramble on about scenery and how he feels towards certain character's actions and feelings. Some readers may enjoy detail, but excess detail, from my vantage point, makes the story needlessly long and a strenuous read. I in particular do not appreciate it when an author forces me to continue reading a story that seems to take forever to develop.
Another aspect aside for the excess detail used by Fitzgerald, is his weak and cliché storyline. Its been done, honestly, William Shakespeare wrote this same type of story a while back, Fitzgerald simply chose to give it a twist by moving the setting to the roaring twenties, but unfortunately that added little excitement to a boring and unoriginal story. I will try not to give away any of the major portions of the storyline, but still explain why I feel this way towards The Great Gatsby, and the way it was written. First off the characters are all, in the words Holden Caufield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in The Rye, "phonies", prototypical aristocrats of the 1920's, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. That includes the narrator Nick, who leaves the rural mid-west for a life of glamour in the "capital of the world" NYC. I personally had a difficult time relating to their personalities and their various "issues". Another aspect that makes the story dull and repetitive is its "classical" love hook. This is a feeble attempt by Fitzgerald to add spice to an otherwise tasteless novel. Its unoriginal, and not what I expected from one of the best authors in American literature.
Now I will not tear the novel to shreds or call it a waste of time, but I rather watch grass grow than reread The Great Gatsby. If you as a reader are able to overlook the excess descriptions given by Nick throughout the novel, the predictable storyline, and the abrupt and disappointing ending, then you will love this book, maybe even consider it as one of your all-time favorites. But I for one would like to forget I ever read it. If The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "greatest masterpiece" maybe we should reconsider his status as one of the best writers in American Literature.