The Great Gatsby

The Book Cover -



It's been a while since I have been able to read, when I say read, I'm not implying academic texts. Anyway, so an aimless stroll into Starmark led me to buy a few classics I had always wanted to read but never found the time. And one of them, which I just finished is the, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.


I admit that the beginning was kind of monotonous, mostly because it set the stage and mood of the plot by describing in excruciating details the life of East and West Egg around New York. But once you drag yourself through it, you get absorbed more and more in the innocuous characters and wonder why they do what they do, making you delve deeper into human psyche, especially those of the rich and affluently careless. And as the harmless plot beguiles you into a more sinister ending, you finally get the flow, the beauty of the simple narration.

It is a good book, a decent read. Not promising anything extravagant, nor letting you down.

Some of the phrases that I liked a lot were -

The very famous comment by Gatsby himself, " Her voice is full of money."

"It isn't just an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window."

"She was only extemporising but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you, concealed in those breathless, thrilling words."

"..and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent.."

"I'm thirty. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour."

"..its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity of wonder."