The Great Gatsby

In 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned". That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned and, above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic 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--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties and waits for her to appear. When s he does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbour Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. Perry Freeman, Amazon.com

View other editions of The Great Gatsby.
View books by F Scott Fitzgerald.

The Great Gatsby. Amberg Penguin edition - Rated
This is a well known 20th century classic, simply bound and finished in leather with integral titled bookmark. A pleasure to read and handle. An edition to treasure.

Great style, little substance - Rated
The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a beautifully written book. The final pages in particular are famously elegant and thought-provoking. However, despite this obvious literary brilliance I found it was a novel that was very difficult to warm to.

Like its characters, The Great Gatsby is ultimately shallow and has little of note to say. For me, Fitzgerald never got under the skin of his characters and that is what a novel like this needs. I liked the style, but this certainly isn't one of the best novels of the C20th to me.

The greatest triumph in American literature - Rated
Scott Fitzgerald's novel, the great gatsby, perfectly captures the disillusionment of post-war America; written as a culmination of a series of short stories such as "A diamond as big as the ritz", the novel seeks to exam the new "culture" that gripped America so famously in the jazz age. Fitzgerald creates certainly his most interesting and well crafter narrator in the novel, and uses him as a mouthpiece for certain quantities of his OWN opinion. Yet it is left to the reader to assume their own opinion and views on each of the characters and the general themes explored. A stunning read.

Well written, weird characters - Rated
The quality of Fitzgerald's writing is superb - sometimes entire paragraphs make you drunk like poetry. His characters are alien and unsympathetic, which perhaps is also a compliment to his writing, as he probably meant them to be.

Fantastic Characters, Little Plot - Rated
Gatsby himself is known as one of the greatest characters in American literature and it's easy to see why- F Scott Fitzgerald does an excellent job at creating an intrigue around him. In fact, all of the characters are superbly developed and unique which makes all the dialogue really entertaining. The first person narrative voice is also likeable and well realised.

Everything is set up to make this an excellent novel but then nothing really materialises from it all. There only seems to be half a story which certainly doesn't have any kind of final act or climax- the story just seems to peter out.

I'd still say the book is worth reading- it's ridiculously cheap, quite short and fairly entertaining. It's certainly not as great as some of the other reviews lead me to think.