Thursday, November 12, 2009

Book 50: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I finished reading The Great Gatsby around the 19th October, 2009. I started it first out of the hundred because it was at arms reach and it's a couple of hundred pages and I knew that re-reading it would be a pleasure.

The internet informs me that the book has a theme of the destruction of the great American dream by the moral and social decay brought on by too much money in the early 1920's. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's mind that might be what he was writing (which was the same time the book is set) but when I read it this time out of that milieu my experience is of a story of love gone wrong and commentary on how people can devalue eachother, cause a mess and then run away but that running away doesn't solve the problem because if you don't fix what's wrong with you the same problems arise wherever you go.

The story is by the character Nick Carraway who moves to the east coast of the US to become a financial worker. He learns about his neighbour Jay Gatsby who is nouveau riche and throws crazy parties where people go who don't even know him. Nick has a cousin in Long Island near where he settles who is in a fundamentally busted ass relationship with a once famous sports guy he went to college with who is now suffering from a bit of small man syndrome. Nick finds out that Daisy and Gatsby have a past which comes to impact all their lives.

So anyway I won't write too much more about it. If you haven't read it then do so, it won't take much time, it's a simple tale that is well written and worth reading and for some reason people always refer to it even recent TV (e.g. Greek Series 1 Episode 12) of all things.

It also has the best closing line of all the books I've read which I won't spoil for you here, which sums up the futility of trying to recreate the past or striving for goals which are unattainable.

Until we turn the next page :) have fun!