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.
- Genre: Romance, Drama, Historical
- Age: Mature Young adult
- Source: owned ebook and borrowed translated hardcover
- Read from July 06 to 07, 2013
FINAL RATING: ★★★☆/★★★★★
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This book was quite a new experience.
It's full of metaphors and symbolism but i still have no idea what to think of it. The main problem i had with this book was the focusing of time and space around them... I often found myself confused because of that and that is the reason i couldn't rate it higher (maybe it was because of translation, i don't know...). It also took me a great amount of time fully understand the characters & the relationships between them.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
This book is about Gatsby, but not from his perspective but from the perspective of his would be friend, Nick. And this is a story of how Gatsby perused a dream. And how that dream ended. In a cruel reality.
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Meet our Mr. Gatsby~
He is wealthy, he throws expensive parties where everyone is invited, but no one knows who he really is. People around him never knew about his life and therefore speculated many things about him.
One thing that you as a reader should know is the scheme of relationships between characters:
Gatsby and Nick are neighbors. Nick and Daisy are cousins. Jordan and Daisy are friends. Jordan and Nick are dating (?). Daisy is married to Tom, and Tom is having an affair with the wife of George Wilson, Myrtle Wilson. And now comes the main point of the story => Gatsby is in love/obsessed with Daisy.
A woman who can't be his. He has known her for a long time, and she was to him the perfection, the golden ticket he longed for. She represented status, wealth and influence, the things he always wanted. Because, he wasn't always wealthy man - although now he is one. And that is why their relationship to me represents a sort of capitalism (Daisy) and consumerism (Gatsby) - probably because of this: capitalism ruins consumerists while consumerism builds capitalism... just like their relationship... .
I don't know how to feel about Daisy ... i can't understand if she really loved Gatsby or if she used him to escape her dull marriage. And because she wanted excitement in her life. She was one of those people who knew that beauty is the most important thing in 1920 and she used it in her advantage.
“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
But that point exactly show how underestimated women were in this age, and that only thing that was valuable in women was beauty and not intelligence. Which Daisy perfectly understood.
Nick was dull and boring narrator, and he knew stuff others didn't but sometimes he could have saved situations by merely speaking, which he never did. He didn't want to meddle i think...
And the idea of this book: NO ONE IS PERFECT. And they are not supposed to be perfect. You may or may not like/love characters - but that's ok, that is exactly how this book is supposed to be.
As for the ending... i didn't expect it though i was extremely sad that no one was there in the end...
So um....... i have no idea what to think of it... that's it. (I want to see the movie T_T)
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