Customer Rating:  
Summary: What Can I Add?
Comment: This book has over 1000 reviews. There is, essentially, nothing that I can say that has not already been said.
The novel is nice, well-written, and an enjoyable read. The characters are all plausible, believable, and entertaining. They are all three-dimensional, and none of them are useless. The book is extremely well-written, and I would recommend it to just about anyone. I wouldn't call it flawless, though.
Perhaps because of the hype, perhaps because it lacks some sort of jenais se quas, I can't quite bring myself to give this book five stars.
B+
Harkius
Customer Rating:
Summary: As American as apple pie...
Comment: This is absolutely my favorite novel of all time. No matter how many times I go back and re-read this book (that I was first introduced to as a sophomore in high school), it never fails to take me to a different time and place.
I love the descriptions of the lazy and decadent ways of these characters and the struggle Nick Carroway has to be a part of them. I love the scandals that are around every curve. But, most of all, I love the easy-going manner of Gatsby himself. He's quite possibly the greatest character in all of American literature and I feel that, often times, he's the least appreciated too.
I've heard many say that this novel is "too slow" or "too descriptive". But, I really feel that Fitzgerald was trying to completely overwhelm the reader with excess. It's an underlying theme in this novel and his writing style makes the reader feel the fact that money can not buy happiness. Sure this novel is wordier than some - But there's beauty in each and every carefully chosen one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Summer of '22
Comment: Aside from the narrator, Mr. Carroway, who chances to be Gatsby's perceptive neighbor, we are the only ones who ever come to know the man. Everyone else sees only a fragment of him... if that. And he is far from what he appears to be. We ultimately know him as delusional, obsessive, pitiable, and needy. The fact is he's quite a bit like many of us; the difference is in the contrast between his external persona and his internal one. Fitzgerald's remarkable achievement in this book is in portraying Gatsby's dimensionality so completely in 180 pages. From shadowy playboy to abandoned corpse in 180 pages. And in the process Fitzgerald treats is to his remarkable craft:
"Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside - East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety."
"...there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings."
"Everyone suspects himself of at least one cardinal virtue..."
"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could `come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."
"...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."
"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind..."
"At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the room."
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Great Gatsby
Comment: Today is one of those days when I long for a book such as "The Great Gatsby"
It is inseparably associated with a point in history F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed to despise. He is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and probably his era's harshest critic. Complex and timeless. Who could ask for more?
My favorite passage -
"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. 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 for 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."
Customer Rating:
Summary: An intimate, touching story that deserves its praise while still being thoroughly relevant despite its age; a solid "A"
Comment: At 26, I just finished reading this for the first time and I have to say it completely captivated me. F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose style was thoroughly engaging, and I was fascinated with how he downplayed (and at the same time characterized) the narrator of the story (Nick), by focusing on his observations of Gatsby and the other characters around him.
This is a novel I heard a lot about and I was ready for a bit of a disappointment, considering that it was so "hyped." This is one those few works of art that deserves its high praise however. There is truly a freshness to the story and yet a keen criticism of the times.
My only criticism (which prevents this from getting the "A+"): the climax of the story. I won't provide any spoilers, but it became a little too preposterous for me, both in terms of coincidence and the large-scale events that occur (relative to the intimate proceedings and narrow focus of the story prior to this).
Nevertheless, F. Scott Fitzgerlad definitely got his themes across and I find it remarkable that so many of them still apply so completely today, 80+ years on.
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