Name: Matthew Jackson's review of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Item: The Great Gatsby
Rating: 4
Author: Matthew Jackson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

'It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life' Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

The Great Gatsby

doxi 

"I wouldn’t ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can’t repeat the past" 

"Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"

The Great Gatsby, by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of the great novels of twentieth-century literature. Set in the Long Island of 1922, it provides a critical social history of America during the “Roaring Twenties”, an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the “Jazz Age”, known for unprecedented economic prosperity, the evolution of jazz music, flapper culture, and bootlegging and other criminal activity. A historic period when “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession”, as classified by The New York Times.

Hana 

Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.

'She never loved you, do you hear?' he cried. 'She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!'

Avarni B

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...

tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further 

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. 

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" 

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." 

"But it's so hot," insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, "and everything's so confused."

It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.

akshita

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on 

 with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. 

Bart Veldhuijsen 

'One thing's sure and nothing's surer. The rich get richer and the poor get - children'

"Leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder . . . A revelation of life . . . A work of art." —Los Angeles Times Set in during the Roaring Twenties, this masterful story by F. Scott Fitzgerald is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to Long Island and attempts to learn the bond business in New York City after the war. There, he co-mingles on Long Island with his affluent and wealthy socialite cousin Daisy Buchanan, her brute of a husband Tom, and friend Jordan Baker. Nick's new residence sits across the bay from Daisy and Tom's house, and right next to a mysterious mansion. He begins to hear rumors of an infamous man named Gatsby who resides there. Eventually, when Gatsby learns of Nick's ties to Daisy, he extends Nick an invitation to one of his lavish parties. Gatsby's plan to court Daisy, in an attempt to revive a previous love affair, eventually bubbles to the surface and tragedy ensues. Dubbed the Great American Novel more than any other piece of literature to date, The Great Gatsby is sure to captivate readers with it's exquisitely crafted prose and poignant message about trying to relive the past. Packaged in handsome and affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is series of essential literary works. From the musings of literary geniuses such as Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to the striking personal narratives from Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our literary history through the words of the exceptional few.

morgan

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.

I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. You see I think everything's terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I 

. I've been everywhere and I've seen everything and done everything. Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

[..] one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

[...] the most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

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.

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

Matthew Jackson

gatsby is sort of a loser actually.. what a lonely man 

ayoni

This new edition of The Great Gatsby includes a foreword by critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith, as well as an exclusive extract of his forthcoming novel, NICK, which imagines narrator Nick Carraway's life before he meets Gatsby Enigmatic, intriguing and fabulously wealthy, Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties at his West Egg mansion to impress Daisy Buchanan, the object of his obsession, now married to bullish Tom Buchanan. Over a Long Island summer, his neighbour Nick Carraway, a writer and a cousin to Daisy, looks on as Gatsby and Daisy's affair deepens. Tragedy looms in F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, frequently named among the best novels of the twentieth century. 'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel' - Sunday Times 'More than an American classic; it's become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the Amercian dream' - Guardian

Lovro Oreskovic

I have had this book on my reading list for a long time. As you can expect, what prompted me to read it was the movie that came out some time ago, and I wanted to read the book before going to the movies. 
To be honest I am not a really big fan of the book. The plot is really concise and basically nothing complicated or really interesting happens during the whole book. And the narrator jumps forward all the time so you can not understand all the causes of some situations, it gets kind of shallow at times. 
That being said, there are a few sentences that when I read them I had to stop and appreciate them. 
So in no particular order here they go: 

... It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. ...

..."No ... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. ...

... I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. ...

... "I'm thirty," i said. " I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." ...

All in all I'm going to go watch the movie, because I am interested how the screenplay writer/s handled the text of the book, but to me it is not such an epic text that a lot of people are calling it.

The Great Gatsby is generally considered to be the finest novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in an easy style, without complex literary experiment, at the height of the author s maturity, it is now an undisputed classic of American literature and is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The novel brilliantly brings out Fitzgerald s central theme of the dark surrounding the brightest light, the shallowness of many human friendships, and the eerie silence as the syncopated rhythm of the jazz fades. It brilliantly captures both the disillusion of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. The novel tells the story of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, an army lieutenant, who lives in a luxurious mansion on the affluent Long Island shore. His lavish parties for the glitterati of the day had become legendary on the island. Yet amid the throng of guests, starlets and champagne waiters, their host appeared oddly aloof. The parties were to impress only one person, that is, Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby had a brief affair with Daisy before the war and her marriage to Tom....About Author:

Amna A.

" When you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had."

"Everyone suspects himself at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people o have ever known."

Luke Harkness

An epic in the English language and a tale of intrigue

I'll obviously express my full views on this on my website but in short: The Great Gatsby is a novel everyone should have heard the name of. If not for the novel itself then the Leonardo Di Caprio film reimagining. The story tells of the mysteries of one man from the point of view of another. There are some intriguing characters and some wonderfully written prose. It's a treat on the ears, though I'd argue it falls a tad short on the storytelling.

Vicky  Nuñez 

I honestly don't know how can I rate this book. It annoyed me so much it gave me a headache. I get it is beautifully written, but the characters made me want to seriously injure them. What a bunch of whiny, shallow characters. Maybe it was a revelation at the time, but now it just talks about the stupidness we can see everyday in people who think marriage is a game for their own amusement.

I really wish Fitzgerald had written a Jordan Baker spin-off sequel; clearly, there's a mysterious depth hidden beneath her skin. Ideally it would feature some frosty dates with Nick in hotel parlours, richly plated in impersonal art deco (the hotel's, that is). Their words would carome passed each other like struck golf balls, disappearing into the dark recesses beneath vanishing velvet curtains. Whole pages would be dedicated to Nick's brooding internal monologue, emerging as not so many pointless observations, like the abrupt scratch on vinyl as the record ends. The tone would be Nabokovian. The epilogue lighthearted. 

In summary: was Daisy even in this book? I barely recall. Gatsby's anxiety was not endearing. The dinner party with the mistress claims the most memorability. Nick's principle of disengagement makes for b-o-ring protagonism. Wonderfully written.

Boring. I'm clearly not a fan of the old classics.

"I realised it was my responsibility, because no one else cared"

read this classic again. it is an avalanche of emotions that keeps growing on you and engulfs you all at once, leaving you soaked in a profound sense of familiarity and betrayal. this book is a reminder that any expression of love could be false because a selfish heart cannot love, even if it feels like love for a very long time.

Hamza

"I realised it was my responsibility, because no one else cared"

read this classic again. it is an avalanche of emotions that keeps growing on you and engulfs you all at once, leaving you soaked in a profound sense of familiarity and betrayal. this book is a reminder that any expression of love could be false because a selfish heart cannot love, even if it feels like love for a very long time.

Jade Dufty

"i hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

going into this i was kinda biased. i'd seen the movie already, and while it was well done i just couldn't enjoy it. so, as i started the book i tried to forget all that and i promise i tried to like the book. while some parts were good, other's just weren't.

i recognize that tom buchannan was created to be aggravating, and make you question while daisy was still with him, but i just cant handle him. everything he says and does makes me '????' inside. like introducing your wives cousin to your mistress ON PURPOSE? the only thing i have to say is 'why?'. also the amount of comments he makes about race... are we sure F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't just using tom's character to perpetuate his own racism? anyway. 

the only character's i can wholeheartedly say i liked were daisy buchannan, jordan baker, and the drunken man in gatsby's library. 

i took a while to get through the great gatsby despite it's shortness. there were parts that were just very boring, and lacked true emotion. and however, i have to admit that the ending was mildly upsetting. we learn how truly alone gatsby really was. he didn't truly have anybody in his life. 

so i gave it 2/5 stars as the good clearly outweighed the bad.

Atli 💗🧚🏽‍♀️

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, "The Great Gatsby," is often hailed as a literary classic, yet despite its acclaim, it left me with mixed feelings. While the novel is not boring by any means, it also didn't elicit a "wow" factor for me, ultimately earning it a modest three-star rating. 

One notable aspect of the story is the complex relationship between Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway. The undeniable closeness and intense interest Nick displays towards Gatsby do raise questions about the nature of their connection. Some readers may interpret it as a form of unrequited love or admiration bordering on infatuation. While this interpretation adds depth to the characters' dynamics, the novel does not explicitly explore or confirm such feelings. "

The Great Gatsby” helps readers picture the roaring `20s vividly by featuring this era's allure, glamour, and dark underbelly. Fitzgerald's prose perfectly captures the opulence and superficiality of the era while also delving into themes of unattainable dreams, social class divisions, and the destructive power of obsession.

Despite these strengths, the novel didn't completely captivate me. While it provides a compelling critique of "the American Dream" and the emptiness that can come with wealth and glamour, I found myself longing for deeper character development and a more nuanced exploration of the themes. The narrative can feel somewhat detached, with characters that, while intriguing, often remain enigmatic and distant. The characters felt like they hadn't yet reached their full potential.

Jules

This book wasn’t what I was expecting… but I still liked it :)
The language doesn’t flow quite as well for me just because it was written in the 1920s, there were a couple parts that had me confused. The book had great imagery. You should know this is a sad book. I didn’t put that together until about the end (despite the cover lol), but I still found it enjoyable. It’s especially sad Gatsby invests his life in a single dream, and over hypes it so much that it basically crumbles before his eyes. But something about Gatsby is endearing, I don’t know what it is, but he was sort of comforting in a way to me. Every time he said ‘old sport’ had me smiling. Definitely a classic worth picking up.
🏞️🗽🏡🍾💃🏼

Liam Ellul

Poor Gatsby.

I enjoyed the narrator: a timeless outsider watching a spectacle unfold.

rhegan🧋

Kendall McClain

Everyone in this book was insufferable and boring,

A sumptuously illustrated adaptation casts the powerful imagery of F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel in a vivid new format. From the green light across the bay to the billboard with spectacled eyes, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 American masterpiece roars to life in Katharine Woodman-Maynard's exquisite graphic novel--among the first adaptations of the book in this genre. Painted in lush watercolors, the inventive interpretation emphasizes both the extravagance and mystery of the characters, as well as the fluidity of Nick Carraway's unreliable narration. Excerpts from the original text wend through the illustrations, and imagery and metaphors are taken to literal, and often whimsical, extremes, such as when a beautiful partygoer blooms into an orchid and Daisy Buchanan pushes Gatsby across the sky on a cloud. This faithful yet modern adaptation will appeal to fans with deep knowledge of the classic, while the graphic novel format makes it an ideal teaching tool to engage students. With its timeless critique of class, power, and obsession, The Great Gatsby Graphic Novel captures the energy of an era and the enduring resonance of one of the world's most beloved books.

The Great Gatsby: a Graphic Novel Adaptation

The Great Gatsby has been a favorite of mine ever since I first cracked its cover open in high school. The melancholy tale of vainly clinging on to the past under the decadent opulence of the post-WWI modernism mesmerized me at the first read, and continues to do so with each reread and countless adaptations the story has merited since.
Woodman-Maynard's adaptation takes this story known for its powerful imagery and fascinating characters, and makes it even more magnetic with beautiful water color illustrations.
 
At the end of the day, it is an adaptation, so don't expect an identical retelling of the novel, but the graphic novel has definitely succeeded in capturing the spirit of the story beautifully.

In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the flamboyance, the carelessness and the cruelty of the wealthy during America's Jazz Age. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This beautiful Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by David Stuart Davies. The Great Gatsby lives mysteriously in a luxurious Long Island mansion, playing lavish host to hundreds of people. And yet no one seems to know him or how he became so rich. He is rumoured to be everything from a German spy to a war hero. People clamour for invitations to his wild parties. But Jay Gatsby doesn't heed them. He cares for one person alone - Daisy Buchanan, the woman he has waited for all his life. Little does he know that his infatuation will lead to tragedy and end in murder.

Erin Darlyn

The Great Gatsby well illustrates the hollow misery of a life lived primarily for self and money. I did not much like the story or characters, but I can admire the way Fitzgerald used tone and beautifully crafted sentences to tell the story beneath the surface.

I get it's place in the American cultural canon but literally why, it's the least engaging and poorly done character work in a LONG series of novels. I just struggled to like anything about anyone in this novel. It doesn't mean it's not good, it's just one of the worst executed things for my taste. 

_linia_

I didn’t necessarily enjoy reading this novel, but I liked use of symbolism. I like this novel’s criticism of The American Dream and how it shows that humans are constantly searching for contentment in all the places they will never find it. God is the only true satisfaction for our souls.

Jeweliet Coffee

Gatsby is a real yearner I tell ya, old sport

Corn Dawg

Cody Degen

There’s a reason they don’t call it the average gatsby

maria anna

Im seriously jay gatsby (posting an insta story in hopes of my crush noticing me and replying to it)

Sarah

lexie

tbh i liked the beautiful and damned better than the great gatsby. okay so one thing that i got so sick of, is where gatsby keep calling anyone “old sport”

Haritlak Thawikasikam

As tragic as it can be. Nice book and nice movie though.

Matthew Jackson &
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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