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Book Review: The Great Gatsby
New York. One of the cities I love. A city with a history and characters. A melting pot of time and cultures. This is the place for the novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
When a great story is wrapped around that place, and the time, almost post-Sherlockian Victorian Era (you will relate to this a lot if you read my reviews), it reveals not only the imagination of the author but also the societal narrative of the times.
My review is just that of a star-struck reader. So I leave it to you to pick a copy and enjoy it yourself.
The Cover:
The book covers vary — some bringing the love between Daisy and Gatsby to the front, and others bringing in the societal nature of New York — often portraying the houses and cars.
The Plot and the Characters:
The story is a complex and compelling piece told in the first personal narrative of Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate, trying to find his feet in the bond business in New York. He happens to pick a decadent house with an unkempt garden ( ‘the tall, uncut grass’) in West Egg, a fictional part of Long Island, jutting into the sea. His neighbor happens to be Jay Gatsby, a rich guy with a mysterious past. Initially circumspect, Nick is drawn into the boisterous and colorful parties that Gatsby hosts in his house, with loud music and dance. The parties are a hit, and many people, often ignored by the East Egg, would turn up uninvited and have a jolly good time.
Gatsby connects with Nick, calls him ‘old sport’, and offers his attention to him. Through Nick’s first-person narrative, we get to understand Gatsby’s lifestyle and the society of the 20’s New York. The West Egg is the up-and-coming new rich, while the East Egg is filled with the traditional rich with a high-class demeanor — ‘arrogant and patriarchal’, represented by Tom Buchanan. His wife, Daisy, decided to marry Tom after a fair amount of thought, for she wanted a stable, well-adorned life insulated from worldly worries. Her childhood friend Jordan Baker, a golf player, and two years younger than her, connects the dots as a participant in Gatsby’s parties and, at the same time, lives on the East Side, acting as the bridge between the world of Nick and Gatsby, and that of Tom and Daisy.
