The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is one of the classical novels that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Last year I got a copy for Christmas, and this month I finally found the right time to dig into it.
The story follows the life of Nick Carraway as he settles into life in New York during the summer of 1922. His neighbour is the elusive Gatsby, a man that throws great parties where no one really knows the host and very few people are ever invited. We see how Nick gets drawn into the social circles around Gatsby, and how he ends up dealing with the fleeting experiences they seem to live for.
This is my first time reading a book set America during the 1920's. I enjoyed getting a small glimpse into the excessive life style that the well off people indulged in during these years. In many ways it reminded me a of what I usually find in books set in the high society of late 19th century England.
I think the book did a very good job on portraying how a life can be fashioned around a dream and how it all can come tumbling down in the end. Knowing the history of the 1920's it is almost impossible not to see the correlation between the shattering of the dreams in the book and the shattering of the American Dream when the Wall Street crashed in 1929.
The protagonists somewhat passive role worked nicely in this novel. He gets a bit too sappy at times, but it never got to the point were it really annoyed me. His role was to observe how the other people shaped their lives and to give us an idea of how society viewed the splendour he found himself in. If he had been too active I think a bit of the magic that surrounded the setting and the other characters would have disappeared.
Once I got started the book was a very fast read, both due to its' short length and the easy language used. The easy language was especially noticeable in the dialogues, were the naivety and the main characters' strange view of life really shone forth.
After having finished the book I was left with mixed feelings. It was a very good book, but it did not quite live up to all the praise that I have been hearing about it.