The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is another of those classics I’ve been promising myself I’d get around to for years, and now I have, and yet again I’ve been blown away.
I seem to remember reading Tender Is The Night years ago, but can remember next to nothing about it. I suspect that Fitzgerald, like Jane Austen, is one of those authors you can be too young to read. Tragically, they are also the sort of authors that are given to kids as required reading.
But as for The Great Gatsby, it’s a wonderful take on ambitions, dreams, and the semi-permeable boundaries of class. Gatsby lives alone in his massive house in West Egg, hosting lavish parties. He is an object of fascination to new arrival Nick Carraway, who lives in a small house next door. Gatsby, who trails an aura of vague notoriety wherever he goes, is in love with the glamorous Daisy. She is seemingly unhappily married to the stymied, bullying, unfaithful Tom. Tragedy ensues.
The thing that struck me most is how exquisitely filtered everything is. We follow Nick as these characters open up to him, like Chinese dolls, revealing different facets of themselves as everything rushes to its denouement. They are faithless and shallow, and it is Gatsby, the fraud and criminal, who at least sticks true to his doomed dream. For such a small book, it really delivers pounds per punch.
