The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Title: The Great Gatsby.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Genre: Literature, romance, social criticism, historical fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: April 10, 1925.
Summary: The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby with a mysterious past and origins and his love for the beautiful former débutante Daisy Buchanan, and of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” It is an exquisitely crafted tale of America's Jazz Age, or the Roaring Twenties, that stands as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
My rating: 9/10
My review:
♥ "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had."
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppression. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
♥ And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to the East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.
♥ He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in your as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
♥ "Anyhow, he gives large parties," said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
♥ The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something - most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning...
♥ "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all."
"I am careful."
"No, you're not."
"Well, other people are," she said lightly.
"What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident."
♥ "Anything can happen now that we've slid over the bridge," I thought; "anything at all..."
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
♥ It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.
♥ There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.
♥ Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
♥ No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
♥ His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed - that voice was a deathless song.
♥ It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
♥ But the rest offended her - and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village - appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded in inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
♥ Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and never would have again.
♥ "I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."
"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
♥ There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.
♥ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentuous, menacing road of a new decade.
It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupé with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamour on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let let their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
♥ "They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
I've always been glad I said that. It was the only complement I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of colour against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption - and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-bye.
♥ "I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour."
She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
♥ I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace - or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons - rid of my provincial squeamishness for ever.
♥ And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way to Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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 further... And one fine morning--
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.