Book Review: The Great Gatsby

Genre: Modernist novel
Title: The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rating: 1.5/3
Read online here

Plotline (from Goodreads):

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.

My take:

The truth is, I found this book  quite dull. The plot didn't move sluggishly, but when coupled with a vocabulary that didn't quite point to any action, it failed to capture my attention very effectively. (But then again, maybe it's just because our attention spans aren't as long as they used to be. Ruined by TV and other fast-paced technology...)

This book isn't for any young adult readers or adventure/thriller seekers. If you like classic books however, or are just feeling very serene and calm and think you can go through it all, by all means, go ahead. The book is pretty interesting; just not the interesting most people are looking for.

SpoilerAlert!

After I finished, I felt like hitting something. I had suddenly developed this vehement hatred for Daisy through the course of two chapters, starting from when she ran Myrtle over. Gatsby matter-of-factly said that he would say he was driving, and was even killed becoause of it! And after all he had done for her -- waited while she married, taken the blame for her mistake, and getting killed because she was too much of a coward to man up to what she did and tell her husband -- in the end, she didn't even have the decency of going to his funeral! Tom I can at least somehow understand; he didn't know the whole truth, so everything seemed justified to him. But Daisy! Oh, how could she!

I completely share Nick's point of view at the end of the book. Perhaps this indicates that I get sucked into the emotional train of things too much, but so be it. After all, that's what a good book's for, right?