Reviews with content warning for Blood - The Great Gatsby

8 March 2021
This is a classic, so I'm not tagging it, but, yeah: SPOILERS

This marks my third reading of Gatsby.

Is Nick Carraway the original millennial? He ghosts Jordan Baker, feels bad about it, and tries to clear it up, just because, you know, you shouldn't ghost. Also, he hangs out with awful, rich homeowners while he rents and takes the train to work.

You could write an extensive research paper on the symbolism of housing in this book. Gatsby's huge mansion is modeled on a French Hotel de Ville -- with a tower! He buys his parents a house in Minnesota, but of course it isn't his. When his father, Henry, comes for the funeral, he shows Nick the picture he has of Gatsby's mansion, which he carries around in his wallet. That house is not just a symbol of everything he's accomplished, it's also the only tangible thing he's accomplished.

And yet, despite the flashy, fancy mansion that he owns, Gatsby is always outside of houses.

He hides outside Nick's house waiting to finally meet Daisy again. He stands outside the Buchanan's house waiting for a signal from Daisy that never comes. He doesn't even get to DIE in his own house, but outside it. The number of scenes in which some character is standing outside a house and looking at what's happening inside, or noticing how the light shines out of the windows, well... someone could count them. Not me, at least not this time. That said, the word "house" appears in this book 104 times, and if you add mentions of "mansion" (5) and "palace" (4), that puts us at almost one mention per page. Just saying.

I was also struck by the references to light and dark in this book. We are often looking at windows, and we are often looking specifically at the light leaking out of windows. We are also looking at the way the light bounces off the moon, or the amount of electric lights brilliantly shining out of Gatsby's mansion, or four superfluous candles on an outdoor table at midsummer on the Buchanan's verandah, or the reflections of the sun on the sea, or or or...

In addition, this book always takes place during the day or at night. That sounds stupid, that's when everything takes place, but you always know which one it is (except when you get confused the book says "it's past two" so you think they've just finished their lunch but actually it's 2 in the morning because it's the Jazz Age and they're still partying). It is either the middle of the night and Gatsby is throwing a party and everything is twinkle lights and garden cocktails, or it's an interminable summer day and the hot sun is beating mercilessly down on you. I don't know what this means yet, but I'll be thinking about it.

What else? The usual. Tom is evil, perfectly captured. You know there are still a million toxic men walking around doomed to never repeat their football glory days in high school/college, just like him. Nick is sort of neutral, maybe even borderline normal (but why was he ever friends with Tom? ugh), intriguing, but why does he hang out with these people if he hates all of them? (He's also our millennial renter next door.) Daisy is a dependent, cowed woman first, evil rich person second. Actually, she isn't that evil (until the end), most things just happen to her and she has no control over anything. Then she has control over one thing, handles it extremely poorly, and a lot of people die as a result, no consequences for our poor little rich girl. I don't get why people get mad about this because this is still how our world works, but okay. Jordan is interesting; she has the potential to be so cool and she's such a wet noodle. How do you take a professional female athlete in the 1920s and make her so boring? It's fascinating.

I was thinking, as I read this book this time, that I feel a little different about the writing in itself than I used to. It's beautiful, and I love it. But after reading Henry Green's Living, it feels a little more... limited, maybe. I don't think that's a bad thing, it just makes me realize that the writing is beautiful and I think well done, but of an older tradition, and it's the plot and themes that make it modern, in its way. That's what's new and exciting here.

See you in 5-10 years, Gatsby.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I just read this book for the second time. Previously I always linked it to a train ride in the Netherlands, which was where I read it the first time; from now on I will probably also link it to a friend's sofa in Bogotá. My original impression was that this is not only one of the best books I have ever read, but also one of the most perfect. I was happy to find that the second reading confirmed this opinion! (

First read: 16 September 2008
Second time: April, 2013

Content Warnings

ha1yan's review against another edition

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emotional reflective fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

lizreadssurprisinglyoften's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I'm conflicted about this one. The writing was undeniably beautiful without being over-the-top, and it perfectly illustrated the glittering, futile beauty of the time period. However, that accuracy was a double-edged sword; the casual racism and anti-Semitism made me too sick to fully enjoy the story. Even if I were to try and ignore it, I'm not sure how to process the rest of the book. I'll probably be able to analyze it better after a couple of re-reads in future

Content Warnings

bluejayreads's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Original 2011 rating: 1 star

2021 review:

I read this for the first time in high school and absolutely hated it. Loathed it, in fact. I remember it most vividly for having to write a paper about the motif of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg without understanding what a motif even was. There was no plot, the characters were all awful people, my fundamentalist Christian sensibilities were put off by all the infidelity, and I didn’t understand why anyone wanted to read to the end, let alone liked it enough to call it a classic.

But my husband considers it one of his favorite books, and ever since I read The Chosen and the Beautiful and didn’t hate it, he’s been suggesting that I give this one another chance. I agreed, mainly because the audiobook was short and immediately available at the library.

This time around, I didn’t hate it. I can’t say that I particularly liked it, but at least now I can see why it became a classic (and why my husband loves it so much).

This book is deceptively short for how complex it is. If you read it on the surface (which is how I read it in high school because I didn’t know any other way to read), it’s a boring story of rich people being rich and bored and having affairs and throwing ridiculous parties. It’s also a rare example of the narrator and the protagonist being different characters – Nick Caraway narrates the story, but his role is an observer to what happens to the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, and I did not know what to do with that in high school.

The Great Gatsby, like every classic book I’ve read, has Important Themes. Its main theme is that you can’t recapture, relive, or undo the past – you just have to grieve what you’ve lost and move on, or trying to bring back the past will destroy you and probably other people as well. Jay Gatsby loved Daisy, but he went off to fight in World War I and Daisy married someone else instead. Gatsby’s whole motivation is to get Daisy back, to bring back what they had when she was a rich teenager and he was a penniless young soldier but they were deeply in love, and to convince, gaslight, or force her feelings to be the same as his. Which to me says that he doesn’t love her as a person now, if he ever did, he just sees her as an object of his desire that he can possess, just like all the fancy things in his house.

There are also a lot of poignant, quotable lines in this book, several of which I’ve heard before without knowing they were from this book.

As far as entertainment goes, I did not enjoy this book. There’s no plot, the characters are all horrible people, and from a story perspective I found it pretty boring. But it does have some things of value to say theme-wise, so at least now I understand why it became a classic – even if I still don’t like it as much as my husband does.

Content Warnings

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