The Great Gatsby
1925
Recommended...and not!
Recommended for its ability to capture feelings and gestures, behaviours and emotions, not just peculiar to a certain time but relevant across periods of history. However, there's not much beyond that. It's overwritten, a little thin on subject matter, and the latter is more of a pathetic portrayal than a deep one.The last paragraph is easily worth more than the whole book.
The Great Gatsby is the kind of book that I would have liked more had I never heard about it before. It has been boasted about but truly, I think it holds more of a place in literary history than in literature per se, and will probably be more interesting to the scholar than to the reader.
P.S. Some cliché, very borderline, racial representation (particularly of Jewish characters).
Tags: early 20th century, nouveaux riches, period piece, Jazz Age/Roaring Twenties, the flapper, close quarters, ladies & gents' courtship dance, the "look-through-the-bus-window-observe-and-criticise" thing, socio-cultural disenchantment
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