[11th Grade]

Update: About a week ago I received an email from a Goodreads user about my rating and review of this book. The user said that my review “disrespectful and triggering” and that I “need to delete my account,” and ended the message with a death threat. First of all, I have no idea how they got my email in the first place. Second, of course, I deleted the email, blocked the sender and blocked the user on Goodreads.

I honestly cannot believe that I have to say this, but if you are offended by someone’s review of a book that you like, you probably don’t need to be on this website. There is a blatant warning at the bottom of my profile that says that I “curse in my reviews” and that “some of my reviews may be taken as “too harsh” so if you are easily offended please don’t read my reviews or send a friend request”.

I wasn’t even going to post anything about this, but I just want you all to understand that if someone has a different opinion than yours, it isn’t a shot at you. Learn to stop taking things personally. Hell, from what I’ve learned a difference in opinion can possibly be a good thing. You see something that pisses you off? Just keep scrolling or unfriend me.

I have deleted the review to prevent any further hate spamming from any user on Goodreads.

Thank you for reading. ( )

I was disappointed in this book, after having read Tales from the Jazz Age. I couldn't really get in to the story or connect with any of the characters. I picked it up several times, managing only to read a couple dozen pages at a time, before setting it back down again. I didn't dislike the book, but it just seems that Fitzgerald had a better knack for short fiction, than he did for even this rather short novel. And it hasn't put me off reading his other works. I've got Tender Is the Night waiting in the wings. ( )

This is my second time through this book and I have to sat that it was even better than I remember. The prose poetry alone is enough to give this book 5 stars, but the implications of what Fitzgerald had to say about America and the tragic story of selfish and utterly detestable people is one of beauty. I agree with others who believe this to be one of, if not the, great American novel of the 1900's. ( )

Depressing. ( )

I remember reading this in high school, but I believe most of it went right over my head. It was far more interesting this time around! Fitzgerald really made the wealthy lifestyle sound appealing! And then he made it sound shallow and sad. But his writing is so poetic and articulate, really painting the picture for me, that I hung on every single word! ( )

Great twist and critique of decay in the 1920's. I enjoyed the way in which the story was told as a series of flash backs to bring the significance of the events as they unfolded. ( )

Wow. I read this book when I was in high school, and hadn't given it a lot of thought since, or at least remembered thinking a great deal of it. I woke up in the middle of the night last night wide awake with a cold, and was looking at my phone to see what I had on there to read. I started it around 3:30 or so and finished it not too long after finally getting out of bed.

I found it to be a gripping read, really sharp with a lot going on it. The characters are really vivid, but the descriptions of all the scenes are super vivid too, so you can really picture everything in your mind. He seems to really capture a time well, but by being so specific about the time, it really has lasting value.

Two interesting things: 1) I hadn't remembered (or known) that Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series makes an appearance here under the name of Wolfsheim. 2) I caught a line Bob Dylan used, in Summer Days: "what do you mean you can't repeat the past, of course you can." (Slightly different n the book.) There are lots of parallels between that song and this book. ( )

(Read for school) This was the first book that made me realize how important and influential symbolism could be in a book and this book is absolutely dripping with it. ( )

Necesité 3 intentos para terminar El gran Gatsby.
Tal vez porque conocía la historia por las películas, nunca leí más allá de un par de páginas. Hoy lo hice, estoy muy feliz por ello. Puede resumir sentimientos complejos de la vida real como nadie.

El mensaje también es conmovedor.

Pobrecito Gatsby, creías en el sueño americano, creías en el amor, creías en todas las historias románticas y en las historias románticas, creías que podías pretender ascender. Que tu dinero te daría clase.
Pero todo lo que necesitaba era una confrontación con Tom y tu castillo de naipes, tu imagen de cristal se hizo mil pedazos.
Daisy ni siquiera estuvo nunca en tu mismo universo. Ella ES dinero, tu simplemente lo tienes temporalmente.
Moriste solo, olvidado, descartado. Al mundo nunca le importaste realmente.

El libro golpea duro.
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I liked this book in high school, but didn't enjoy it so much the second time around. ( )

What a weird book. ( )

I know it's a great classic and considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century. I thought the writing was fantastic, but because it didn't move me at all as a story, I didn't rate it higher. ( )

Der große Gatsby ♦ F. Scott Fitzgerald | Rezension

Dieses Buch hat den Ruf, eines der bedeutendsten Werke der amerikanischen Moderne zu sein. Unzählige Generation haben und werden Der große Gatsby in die Hand nehmen, es lesen und versuchen einen Hauch der Ausschweifungen, Dekadenz und des amerikanischen Idealismus der 1920er Jahre zu erhaschen. Doch konnte es mich überzeugen?



Der große Gatsby ♦ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Synopsis

Sommer, 1922. West Egg, Long Island.
Hier spielt die Handlung um den geheimnisumwitterten Jay Gatsby. Aus der Sicht von Nick Carraway, einem jungen Mann, der sein Glück im Wertpapierhandel versucht, und Nachbarn von Gatsby schauen wir auf die Sicht der Dinge, die da passieren werden. Nick erzählt in der Ich-Erzählform über die vielen ausschweifenden Partys auf Gatsbys Anwesen und in wie die Gerüchteküche um den jungen Millionär brodelt. Denn Gatsby scheint einige Geheimnisse zu haben.

Doch all der Luxus und der Dekandenz, die Gatsby umgeben, wird schnell klar, dass dieser Mensch kein glücklicher ist. Er ist einsam und sehnt sich nach der Liebe seines Lebens, welche auf der anderen Seite der Bucht, in East Egg, lebt. Doch Daisy Buchanan ist mittlerweile verheiratet. Denn während der Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges, in dem Gatsby in Frankreich gekämpft hat, und ihr das Warten wohl zu lang war, heiratete Daisy den ehemaligen Footballprofi Tom Buchanan. Doch Tom ist nicht der liebende Ehemann, der er vorgibt zu sein, denn er betrügt seine Daisy mit der Frau einen Tankstellenbesitzers, Myrtle.

Wie es der Zufall will, ist unser Erzähler Nick Carraway ein entfernter Cousin von Daisy und er schafft es, sie und Gatsby eines Tages wieder zusammenzuführen. Daraufhin überschlagen sich die Ereignisse und die Tragik nimmt seinen Lauf.


Meinung

Die Welt erscheint jedem von uns auch mal trostlos und grau. Auch Gatsby hatte dieses Gefühl, schon in jungen Jahren. Er fühlte sich zu mehr berufen. Dazu, die Welt zu sehen, sie zu umarmen und voll auszukosten.
Und er tat, was er tun musste, um zu bekommen, was er begehrte. Doch im Inneren war ein größeres Begehren. Dieses Begehren bringt die Vergangenheit wieder und vielleicht wird es ihn alles kosten, was er hat, um diesem Begehren nachzugeben.

Der große Gatsby ist überwiegend eine Aneinanderreihung vieler unangenehmer und teils oberflächlicher Gespräche von Charakteren, die unbequemer und unsympathischer nicht sein konnten. Ich bin ehrlich, genauso stelle ich mir oft das Leben der Reichen und Schönen vor. (Familie K. aus den USA sind da für mich der beste Beweis.)

Ich konnte mich weder mit dem arglosen, stinkreichen Gatsby, noch mit der egoistischen und irrationalen Daisy anfreunden. So sehr ich hoffte, dass die beiden am Ende ihr Happy End erleben. Daisys Ehemann Tom ist nicht nur untreu, sondern auch noch ein Verfechter der Misogynie. Nick, der im ganzen Buch die einzige Person mit normalen menschlichen Emotionen ist, kam mir teils absolut verloren vor.

"So rudern wir weiter gegen den Strom, unaufhörlich der Vergangenheit entgegen."

Hach, wenn doch nur der Rest dieser Geschichte eines so großartigen Schlusssatzes würdig wäre.

Cover: ★★★☆☆ 5/5
Plot: ★★★☆☆ 4/5☆
Charaktere: ★★☆☆☆ 2/5
Tempo: ★★★☆☆ 3/5
Schreibstil: ★★★☆☆ 4/5
Gesamt: ★★★☆☆ 2,8/5

Fazit

Ja, Mr Fitzgerald konnte zwar mit Worten umgehen, aber dieses Buch wird meiner Meinung nach einfach nur überbewertet. LeserInnen werden mit dem Schlagwort Klassiker angelockt. Doch mich hat dieser berühmte große amerikanische Roman nicht überzeugen können.

This review was first published at The Art of Reading ( )

The tone of the book was sensual, slow, melancholy, hedonistic, and almost boring. Yet, I persisted through the book because it’s long been in my to-read queue and is on some reading lists that I go by.

The people featured are up all hours of the day and night. Sometimes I had to go on for quite a while to determine whether 4 o’clock meant 4 am or 4 pm. Partying was their lifestyle.

In the first few chapters I decided it was a 3-star book. It got a little better as I went on. The author is good at describing scenes & it never felt tedious. ( )

Slow start, but I liked it more as I progressed. It's not a book I typically like (not a fan of the writing of the era), but I was pleasantly surprised. [2013] ( )

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." - Italo Calvino

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Scott Fitzgerald is not a literary writer. He's the king of what I call faux-literature: fill your bowl with plot, add a dash of panache, a cup of nostalgia, three whiffs of yearning, and a drop of insight, and ice it with some fruity prose. Bang, you're done.

But people love him. And who am I to stop the people from having their fun? Like many young people, I adored Gatsby on first reading it during my 17th year. Its exquisite art deco finishing, its sublime sense of pathos, its richness without being threatening like all those disturbing Modernists... Of course, with each passing year, my appreciation of its values lessens, but my appreciation of that feeling remains strong. And perhaps that's the real secret of Gatsby? Like so many folk tales, we can never disassociate the book from the way it drew out our youthful sense of envy, of pain, of ambition, and ultimately of loss. This novel lives within me, and within so many, even though it no longer forms a conscious part of how I view the world. (And say what you will about him; few people have written a closing paragraph as perfect as what Fitzgerald does here.)

A towering piece of 20th century American fiction, nevertheless. ( )

The Great Gatsby is like the Queen (the band, I mean, though Her Majesty might work just the same) of literature: they're both exceedingly overrated (hope I'm not ruffling too many feathers here, but I had to say it). That's not to say they're bad, per se, I just don't understand all the hype. Honestly, the only reason I think the Great Gatsby gets all the acclaim is because it was so American at the time, and so of course, the Yankees went wild (it's just a joke; please don't kill me). But I would never consider this novel the "Great American Novel" over the Grapes of Wrath, especially with lines like this:

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Help, I'm dying of hyperbole! ( )

I really tried to read this because I had heard how wonderful it was. Well, about half way through I just gave up. Its was very dated in its language and just not interesting. ( )

Superb... every time I read it I get something else out of it. Both this book and An American Tragedy were written in the same year. They both deal with similar themes... the destructiveness of the American Dream gone wrong... the shallowness of the Jazz Age.. Dreiser and Fitzgerald are both great writers! Both books are considered "the Great American Novel." I love them both and cannot choose! ( )

Okay, okay... I know. This is a classic work of American Literature. And Fitzgerald writes really beautiful prose. But when I'm reading, I need to have a character to root for--and I could not find one in this entire novel. Pretty much everyone is either cheating or helping someone cheat. Still... it's a nice snapshot of the "Jazz Age" and I love all the symbolism and the richness of the prose, so I can't say I didn't like it. I did. I just didn't love it because I couldn't really get behind any of the characters... and while that may have been Fitzgerald's point about the power of money to corrupt, I still have to be able to hope a character gets what he or she wants, or I won't care what happens in the end. And I really didn't. I got bored. So I took a star off for that. ( )

Sometimes you just gotta go back to the classics; or in my case, read it for the first time. I’m fairly certain this was required reading in my high school English class, but if so, I used CliffNotes to skate by - sorry Mrs. Elvin (although she probably knew).

Okay, back to the Great Gatsby or rather, the Great Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wow, what a writer! His sentences, so verbose, so colorful, so full of adjectives. It’s interesting how current writers seem to do their best to choose one or two descriptive words, or better yet, one big one that many of us need to look up in Webster’s, and mock those who use more, easier to read words. I say, bring back the Fitzgerald style!

As for the book, another wow. How could I have gone decades into my adulthood and not read this book? So much to it: love, fake-love, romance, adultery, murder, and a cover-up; this is good stuff. Written through the eyes of Nick Carraway, the self-proclaimed honest story teller. He narrates the ups and downs of society high-life that he touches the outskirts of by happenstance - he lives, for a short season, next to J. Gatsby.

Nick tells us of the going ons of the Buchanans, Tom and Daisy; how Tom is seeing Mabel Wilson, who is married to the mechanic at the gas station, and how Daisy is in love with Gatsby, and of the parties - oh, the grand parties.

Nick himself is with Jordan Baker, socialite and golf pro, as a means to fit in and pass the time with the likes of those in society. At times, all those beautiful words get jumbled in the reader’s head, but still craft a fantastic story, one that never gets old: Love, jealousy, and murder.

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Loved it, can't believe it took me so long to read. They did a surprisingly good job with the movie. ( )

I didn't remember much of this from high school, and even if I had, then I was 17 with no life experience and these characters were over a decade older, and now I'm 38 with some life experience and the characters are almost a decade younger than I am. So surely a reread would be in order.

The most interesting thing about the book I'd say is the critical reaction and estimation of it. The novel itself I see as well written but with unlikely plot elements for a realist novel and weakness in characterization. I agree with HL Mencken, who said of it "in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that". The reviews of its day were mixed, which seems appropriate.

Now however it has been raised up to the very heights of the literary canon, symbolizing the downside of the American Dream. This despite the fact that becoming wealthy through being drafted into an organized crime syndicate is not, I thought, actually part of the mythical 'American Dream', which has more to do with success through hard work - of which there is none here.

Very well, but it is also symbolic of the Roaring Twenties, they say. Perhaps a very slight segment of that decade, yes, but the 1% is always the 1% in any decade, and today's super wealthy are surely as decadent as this. To be symbolic of a time period is to show the life of the great mass of commoners, which is not The Great Gatsby's concern.

There's the doomed love story, and the fact that Gatsby remade himself for Daisy. Well, it's made clear that he always had a lust to become wealthy and "successful", and this had nothing to do with Daisy; he ran away from his parents and from his background towards his ambition before he ever met her. The love story itself is fairly weak sauce: after they are reunited, about the extent of it is that Gatsby says that Daisy "comes over every afternoon". What happens those afternoons, what is Daisy feeling and weighing up at those times?

Wuthering Heights, it's not.

Not to say it's not a decent short novel. It has its merits, but The Great American Novel... no. ( )

I honestly don't recall much about my first encounter with The Great Gatsby, other than not being particularly interested. Back in 9th grade, there were many things I deemed more important than literature.

Now, 40 years later, I find myself with a newfound appreciation for Fitzgerald's seminal work.

This time, the book struck a different chord. Tom Buchanan's not-so-subtle racist jabs caught my attention immediately—something I glossed over in my youth. The dialogues often felt flat, except when our guide Nick Carraway took the reins. It's hard to believe I nearly forgot he was the narrator. His perspective, especially on Jordan Baker, really grabbed me this time. Jordan, a character I barely remembered, now had me hanging on her every word.

Daisy still irked me, and Gatsby's grand persona felt even more fantastical. Tom and Myrtle... I'm still figuring them out. But George Wilson, a mere footnote in my first reading, now intrigued me with his poignant storyline.

Key Themes and Useful Lessons

With countless reviews over its 100-year history, I doubt I can offer new insights into Gatsby. However, on a personal note, the book imparted some lessons relevant to today:

• The Illusion of the American Dream: Gatsby's quest for Daisy reflects the broader, often illusory chase for the American Dream, reminding us of the importance of grounding our aspirations in reality.
  
  
• Complexity of Human Relationships: Through characters like Nick and Jordan, Fitzgerald reminds us of the depth and complexity inherent in each person, urging us to approach others with an open mind.
  
  
• Confronting Social Issues: The novel's stark class divides and casual racism serve as a stark reminder of the ongoing challenges we face today.
  
  
• The Importance of Self-Reflection: Nick's reflective narration encourages us to ponder the real versus the superficial in our media-saturated world.
  

Interesting Quotes

Here are two of the book's most iconic quotes:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - Nick as Narrator

This final line captures the relentless struggle against time and history, highlighting the often futile effort to escape our past.

"They're a rotten crowd...You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." - Nick to Gatsby.

Nick's affirmation of Gatsby's worth amidst corruption underscores the value of integrity over the moral decay surrounding us.


To my surprise, this re-read was incredibly rewarding, offering insights into both the the human condition and the world around us. I highly recommend it for those seeking deeper self-understanding and societal reflection.

Next on my list are This Side of Paradise and Tender Is the Night.

Post Script: About the Movies

A week after finishing the book, my wife and I embarked on a Gatsby film marathon, starting with the 1974 Robert Redford and Mia Farrow version, then moving on to Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation. The '74 film's fidelity to the book, particularly in dialogue, offered a sense of authenticity I valued. Daisy and Myrtle were as annoying as expected, but Sam Waterston's Nick and Lois Chiles' Jordan stood out, bringing depth to their characters that resonated with my reading experience. (Plus, I've had crust on Lois Chiles since Moonraker.)

The 2013 version, while visually stunning, was a bit over the top. Luhrmann's flair, though impressive, seemed unnecessary for a story already rich in itself.

A tip for high schoolers seeking a shortcut for their book report: the Redford film might just get you an A.

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