The Great Gatsby
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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 be comes 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 s he does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbour 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. Perry Freeman, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Although it is hard to believe this novel could improve, it has. Considering the book's significance to American letters, the Cambridge edition of The Great Gatsby could very well be the literary publishing event of the year." Library Journal
"Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking." James Dickey --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
"Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking." James Dickey --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
IN my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
IN my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The American Dream... not so dreamy after all,
By Lucas John (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics) (Paperback)
A wonderful and groundbreaking investigation of modern America. Daisy Buchanan, outwardly beautiful, utterly superficial, parisitic, morally bankrupt, personifies the brutality (so obvious in her husband) that lies at the rotten heart of the American Dream. Many novelists coming after Fitzgerald took up the theme, but, while America was still enjoying the boom years of the 1920s, he got there first. The fact that it's historically significant in no way detracts from the fact that 'Gatsby' is a great read: sex, violence, lesbianism, mistaken identity ... and golf. What more could you ask for?
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb read,
By ˓c b, (Watford, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
So many excellent reviews of been written of Gatsby that it's hard to add much. It's a truly wonderful work.
Fitzgerald's insight in this book cuts through the blinding American optimism of the time. Though at the time he wrote The Great Gatsby he could not have foreseen the economic and cultural crisis approaching in 1929, he is clearly suspicious and wary of the culture surrounding him, and the tone of this book expresses that he expects evil will come of it. His excellently crafted characters put their faith and their trust in unstable things- wealth, social superiority, commercialism, the power of culture- and their typical American idealism and ambition makes them reach too far for things they don't have, and they end up losing what they did have. Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, is ambitious, but is not blinded by the glamour and excess of the society surrounding him. He is the only character who is actually grieved by the tragedies which befall the others, because he alone values human compassion above society and ambition. Gatsby's belief in the impossible dream - great wealth, first love - echoes the American dream itself and as such is a seductive one and one we all long to believe. I love reading this book and read it again every few years.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"So We Drove On toward Death through the Cooling Twilight",
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
The main story -- a romantic man's doomed attempt to recapture the love of an immature woman -- was less enthralling than expected. Daisy seemed hardly worth all the trouble Gatsby took, and for that matter, neither did entry into her world. She was a cipher. The use of a narrator to connect the various characters was interesting; how could the book have been written otherwise? But at times the plot felt contrived, as with the switching of cars and an accident, and the symbolism around the valley of ashes seemed heavy-handed. Other than the passive narrator, the people lacked even a small degree of self-awareness. (One of the author's points, I assume.) The character who seemed the least conflicted and most sure of himself throughout was the brutal, self-centered Tom.
It was the lesser details in this novel that were enjoyed most. A montage at the end of the second chapter in which the drunken narrator moved from an elevator, to a bedroom, to Penn Station. The effect Gatsby's smile had on those who saw it. A mansion housing a library of books with their pages uncut. The vapidity of a man who tried to act out his limited idea of the good life but had little of interest to say and thought San Francisco was in the Middle West. Dogged efforts at self-improvement linked to shallow goals. A shady character eating with "ferocious delicacy." The way Daisy conveyed her love for a character in just a few words said lightly in front of her husband. The class disdain someone like Tom felt for the main character -- he couldn't be an Oxford man because he wore a pink suit. The gust of hot shrubbery from Central Park wafting through the upper windows of the Plaza Hotel. The author's description of how it felt to reach 30. And the concluding paragraphs, which can still move despite the superficiality of the people portrayed.
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