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The Great Gatsby

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Manufacturer: Scribner
List Price: $14.00
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Noted Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli draws upon years of research to present the Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance exactly as he intended according to the original manuscript, revisions, and corrections--with explanatory notes. Reprint.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780743273565
ISBN: 0743273567
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 180
Publication Date: 1999-09-30
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner


ACCESSORIES:

• The Love of the Last Tycoon
• Tender Is the Night
• The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck Centennial Edition)
• The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: The tragedy of a life unfulfilled, unloved and ultimately unlived!
Comment: "The Great Gatsby" is a sad book. But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that F Scott Fitzgerald's tragic, moving portrayal of the American Dream demonstrates that the typical American's pre-occupation with the yearning for wealth, class and an easier life can ultimately be so empty, so meaningless and so utterly unfulfilling.

When Nick Carraway left what he saw as a comfortable but mundane existence in the Midwest, he moved East to a magnetic New York City to learn the bond business. Renting a "weather beaten cardboard bungalow" in a town called West Egg on Long Island, he met a distant cousin, Daisy Buchanan; her husband, Tom, struggling to live up to the brilliance of a university football career in New Haven; and his next door neighbour, Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic man whose wealth had originated from mysterious means. The many rumours hinted at everything from Prohibition rum-running to murder.

The actual plot of the story, told through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, is so utterly pointless and virtually directionless as to leave the reader wondering how such simplistic, almost mindless melodrama manages to be so compelling and so captivating.

Nick tells the story of his move to New York City. We learn that Jay Gatsby had fallen in love with Daisy Buchanan several years earlier, at a time when he was an impoverished nobody and couldn't hope to marry someone like her. After Gatsby leaves to go to war, her subsequent marriage to Tom Buchanan is ultimately unsuccessful as Tom has an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a local mechanic. Jay Gatsy, now wealthy almost beyond imagining as a result of his involvement in criminal activities - the details of which are never fully disclosed in the story - asks Nick to re-connect him with his former love as he seeks to have Daisy admit that she had never stopped loving him since their first affair many years earlier. Gatsby desperately wants Daisy to confess she had never actually loved her husband at all.

The reader witnesses a non-stop whirl of debauchery as the shadowy Gatsby hosts an endless string of decadent, liquor-soaked bacchanales at his Long Island mansion. The readers are left to question Gatsby's motives as he is portrayed as an observer who never truly participates in his own parties. Indeed, the majority of his guests are clearly pretenders to his acquaintance and wannabe seekers of the trappings of wealth who have never even met their host and wouldn't know him to speak to him on the street.

The climax of the story arrives after a tragi-comic confrontational gathering of virtually the entire cast of Fitzgerald's tale - Tom and Daisy, Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and his erstwhile lover, tennis player Jordan Baker - sitting in a steamy, overheated, hotel room sipping on iced mint juleps casually discussing whether or not Daisy's future rests with Tom or with Gatsby.

The brim of the cup that is "The Great Gatsby" runneth over with licentiousness, hypocrisy, greed, amorality, false friendship and weak-kneed love - in other words, a veritable cocktail of moral turpitude to sip or swill and digest while pondering its base flavours plus a variety of notes and subtle overtones.

In hindsight, it is also worth considering the irony that, as a bond trader on Wall Street in 1925, Carraway would have had but a scant four years remaining before encountering the Wall Street Crash and the utter collapse of his fantastical New York world. Perhaps F Scott Fitzgerald was prescient as well as a brilliant writer who would have us take away the message that it might be worth a moment to reconsider the true meaning and value of every American's fondest "American Dream"!

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Customer Rating:
Summary: so so
Comment: I really tried to like this book more because it does occassionally work. Unfortunately, it just didn't grab me. The only things I really liked about it were the period elements. It does seem to capture the legend and mythology surrounding the 1920's. But, in the end, I didn't really care much about Nick. And Gatsby, while occasionally intriguing, didn't really capture my attention either. Paul Gehrman, Author, Kaleidoscope

Customer Rating:
Summary: Lori
Comment: The book arrived in a timely manner. It was a brand new book. The last used book of the same title I ordered was missing 20 pages.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Classic, enduring, fun, but a bit trite
Comment: This is one of the best books I've read. My only complaint is that it was not as deep and as strange as I like, but lack of depth in the world was the author's point, so I can't expect anything else.

Customer Rating:
Summary: A FAVORITE
Comment: THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, primarily because it is. If you haven't read it, read it.

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