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
Ursula Le GuinHainish Cycle:
The Left Hand of Darkness IV.
1969
A pearl that is all too unknown in Continental Europe. How come? I discovered it through the movie The Jane Austen Book Club ! I've never read any other sci fi in my life but I'd always imagined it to be more 'sci' than 'fi' and more 'pro science' than 'pro life' ; Le Guin threw me aback. I loved it! As a s-fantasy fiction, everything that one expects is in there and more thought through and better 'scripted' than in The Earthsea Series. As a novel, it easily beats up some of the classics of literature. Its depth doesn't stop at a show of wit and a few clever sentences here and there, but goes on to actually form the basis of the whole book. Recommended to anyone who loves fantasy fiction, philosophy, social theory, or suspense. This is good writing without pretension, a strong story without an ounce of show.
P.S. Also, another incentive: it's very rare, at least in fantasy, to have a black male as the main character, particularly given the late 60s context.
Tags: gender structure and relations, androgyny/transsexuality, feminist thought, the "what-the-hell-are-we doing-here" question, racial relations, "homosocial" relations, roman de mœurs, socio-political structure, far far away planets
