In just a few days I have devoured this book. I have even enjoyed being stuck in traffic jams so I can read more and more. It might be a short book but my God, it's in an intense, poetic, yet stripped back style and wasn't really an easy read.
Fitzgerald books have alwaysreminded me of school and the grimness of reading set books when you haven't really got a sodding clue what is going on! Anyway I understood and enjoyed it far more this time. Maybe 25 more years of life experience helped!
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No single person in this book is pleasant apart from the narrator, Nick. He is the only honest character in the entire book. Everyone is deceitful, living a lie, keeping up appearances or living in a dream world. Everyone is vapid or dull apart from GATSBY. He has a spirit, a life force, good looks,a mysterious unknown past,history, brains and courage. The only tragic flaw is that he is living a lie, a usurper in this world of the perfect American Dream.
Today everyone would have found a release from all their tension by going on a programme like Made in Chelsea or selling gossip to the Sun. These people are the monied, uber priveliged, bored twenty something's of the 1920s. All they do is throw parties, drink mint juleps, gossip , lounge about, gossip, drive fast cars around, gossip, bitch and shop. But yes I loved the tragic Gatsby and all the time I was thinking "get that annoying Daisy out of your head Gatsy!" He made all this dodgy money for one reason, so he could be living near to his beloved Daisy, who he first met back West when he was a soldier. He has put Daisy onto a serious pedestal, built her up to be the most important thing in his life. He loves thinking and dreaming about her and when they finally meet things then start to fall apart. The reality just can't live up to the dream and she absolutely fails Gatsby.
Daisy and her husband are so fantastically foul. Poor Gatsby has his heart totally broken and the end is so sad. Yes, I did cry! I'm in love with Gatsby... cricky he was so dumb to still hold a candle for that awful, vapid Daisy!
People say this book is a love story. I'm sorry, I disagree. To me it was a highly cynical, yet beautiful read about how hard it is to fit in if you don't have the right background or credentials and how love is far better in the mind than the close up reality. Illusion is the most important thing. Keep up the appearances and hide what you really think at all costs. Infact hide things so well and so deep that in the end you finally give up thinking about anything or anyone.
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