Book Review :: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Penguin Classics
on February 24th 2000
Genres: Classics, Fiction
Pages: 177
Goodreads

Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires.

Beneath the shimmering surface of his life, Gatsby is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon, this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream, Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.

Last updated on 19 January 2022

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My thoughts on The Great Gatsby

I didn’t really know what to expect when I first picked up The Great Gatsby . I was wary that it would read like a Jane Austin book or a Bronte book; old English and extremely formal, with a million references to people using their entire names. I do enjoy those books, but they take me an age to read because sometimes the language gets confusing. Am I right? Right. But! Mr F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have done a fantastic job on this book and if I were wearing a hat, I’d take it off to you.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Great Gatsby, and recommend it. Set in the early 1920s, and written in the first person from the perspective of Nick Carraway, it has everything: parties, love, affairs and scandals, grand houses, and just a little bit of death. But I won’t give anything away. Go and read it for yourself. It’s nice a short (another good thing) so it won’t take you long.

What I enjoyed most, I think about it, was the wonderful sentences that Fitzgerald manages to dish out throughout the book. He uses such awesome words and creates lines that make you re-read them, just for fun. So, to end this post, I will leave you with some of those awesome sentences:

“In his blue garden men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

“For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of lie in new tunes.”

Have you read The Great Gatsby?