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Idle Book Club Episode 5: The Great Gatsby

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On this episode: Pop the champagne and don a pink sear-sucker because it’s an Idle Thumbs reunion. Nick Breckon has travelled from the far eastern states to join Chris, Sean, and Jake in a lively discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby. Written in 1925, the novel received mostly positive reviews but was mostly overlooked before Fitzgerald's death in 1944. It has since been heralded as one of the great American novels.

We picked this book because it's an Idle Thumbs favorite among Jake, Chris and Nick, and in the grand tradition of reading a book before a major motion picture is released, we've picked it up.

Buy the book from Amazon.

Buy the Kindle edition.

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This book is actually part of one of my fondest in-class memories from high school.

My friend decided not to read The Great Gatsby for some reason, then spent the next month panicking about the final exam, which was going to be entirely on the book. It ends up, the teacher had an emergency at the last possible minute, so we watched the movie version instead. When the camera reveals Gatsby floating in the pool, my friend blurts out in surprise and distress, "Wait, Gatsby dies?" And to think, he almost got away with the perfect crime...

Sorry, I know those are some pretty severe ending spoilers, but it's my favorite thing ever.

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You know how you start to get really into fiction, and start to aspire to become an author, and then you read something so perfect that you realise that there is no way you in hell you have the chops to write great fiction? That was Gatsby, for me. Fitzgerald has great prose that uses beautiful language to paint a scene better than almost anybody I've every read. This, along with Toni Morrison's Sula, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, is one of those books that makes me gush when I start talking about it.

The one theme that really jumped out at me was the overwhelming drive to own material possessions, and how turn of the century America defined class based of material goods rather than lineage. On the simplest level, The Great Gatsby documents the truism that money can't buy you love, or at least not the tainted money Gatsby acquires in his campaign to take Daisy away from her husband. It would have been difficult for him to compete with Tom's resources, in any event. Nick describes the Buchanans as "enormously wealthy," and Tom himself as a notorious "spendthrift". When he and Daisy moved from Lake Forest to East Egg, for example, he brought along a string of polo ponies. "It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that," Nick observes.

Furthermore, Daisy represents the most desirable object of all. She is invariably associated with the things that surround her, her car and her house particularly, and most of all her voice. Everyone remembers Gatsby's remark that her voice is "full of money," but that judgment comes only after several wonderful descriptions and demonstrations of its power. When we first meet Daisy at the Buchanans' dinner party, Nick speaks of her "low, thrilling voice" with its promise that "she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour." Men found it hard to forget. Daisy rarely "says" things. She "murmurs" or "whispers" instead, compelling the listener forward for her breathless message. That voice, Nick concludes near the end of the text(I think?), couldn't be over stated.

A lot of this is cribbed from my old notes from my second year English lit course, but I can't wait to dive back in fully and discuss it with you guys.

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I've read Gatsby so many times that I'm kind of Gatsby-d out but I am definitely looking forward to the first Book Club episode that I'll be able to listen to, having read the book.

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I hate this book, but that is probably because I was forced to read it and analyze it chapter by chapter instead of choosing it and reading it at my own pace.

So, in that, I think I'm looking forward to this? Maybe. It's not a very interesting setting to me.

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This is going to be an intimidating podcast to record.

If you need a running start, begin the podcast like most other Great Gatsby commentary I've seen:

"The Great Gatsby was a book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. It is 218 pages. It takes place during the 1920s. Nick Carraway is the main character and fought in World War I. He meets Tom and Daisy, a couple with a baby. He also meets Jay Gatsby, who throws parties..."

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Great! Gatsby is one of my all time favourites. Looking forward to reading through again post-Downton Abbey.

While Downton is pretty fictitious in most cases and hilariously soapish, I think it does a good job of capturing that feeling of British upperclass extravagance in the early 20th century, and makes frequent (often snide) remarks about their rich American counterparts. It'll be interesting going back to Gatsby's era and being able to compare and contrast those two paths of extravagance.

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I hate this book, but that is probably because I was forced to read it and analyze it chapter by chapter instead of choosing it and reading it at my own pace.

So, in that, I think I'm looking forward to this? Maybe. It's not a very interesting setting to me.

Yeah I had to read it for school, but I still ended up loving it. I also love the movie and think Robert Redford in his prime is so god damned good looking.

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I read this yesterday afternoon since I couldn't get my hand on Evidence of Things Unseen: I liked it a lot and I think it's a wonderful book. Unexpected isn't it?

A particular questions ticks me though: how much of Nick's post-factum bitterness taints his depiction of the events he recounts? Because really, even at the beginning of the book, when Nick says he was most open-minded1, the protagonists are not given any sort of redeemable values: for instance, Daisy isn't depicted as less of a completely superficial and unconsequential person during their first encounter than when he meets her last.

On the first page, he said that the events made him loose his tolerance; so, are Tom, Daisy and Baker given a fair trial or not?

On an unrelated note: reading two books in parallel can mess with your head: I read this as a distraction from Winds in the Willow and was horrified when my mind decided to merge Nick with Mole, Gatsby with Rat and Tom with Toad. It shook off after 2 hours of reading; but still, it was strange while it lasted.

1 though Nick didn't appear to me so much open-minded as completely detached and uninvolved: he sticks and gets dragged around not only to clench his curiosity torward Gatsby but because, after his work is done, he's got nothing else to do.

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The best part of the novel for me occurs after Gatsby's death, where Nick is on a search for people to attend the funeral. I feel the first time you really understand Gatsby is when you realize how divorced from anyone else in the world he actually was. The part where Nick feels like it was him and Gatsby against the world makes me think that Nick's "loss of tolerance" didn't refer as much to Tom, Daisy or Jordan as much as it did to Gatsby, and the fact that Nick thought he was a good man.

Excited to have a classic on the podcast. Hopefully someone gets around to making a good Catcher in the Rye movie so we can do that.

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I know 90-year-old classics are fair game, but would you mind putting

tags around that?

Edit: Thank you.

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This is going to be an intimidating podcast to record.

You only have to compete with 90 years of academia judging every comment you make. No sweat right?

Hopefully you are able to make a case for this book as to why it is considered so important. I read it earlier in the year and I'm scratching my head as to why it's relevant now (I'm assuming it was groundbreaking in its time for some reason).

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The book is relevant now for the same reason it was relevant when it was written. It's a stupendous work of art with poignant messages to teach and amazing images.

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It's good but it's to me one of those novels where the meta-book and thinking about it is more enjoyable than the book itself.

Especially coming off the high of Evidence of Things Unseen the language and universally awful people left me relatively untouched.

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Really excited for this. Read the book for the first time earlier this year and have re-read it twice and flew to London to watch Gatz, the 8 hour play where they read every world. This podcast is the perfect excuse for me to read it again next year.

Also if you love the book you should try and see the play if it ever plays near where you live. For me it was worth the flight to London, having to forgo a nights sleep and the 100 pound price for the delivery of the final monologue alone.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/feb/08/gatz-great-gatsby-west-endl

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This is as good an excuse as any to share this letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an aspiring (and, I dearly hope, not too crushed) novelist:

November 9, 1938

Dear Frances:

I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories "In Our Time" went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In "This Side of Paradise" I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he'll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is "nice" is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the "works." You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn't seem worth while to analyze why this story isn't saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

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I detested The Great Gatsby when I first read it, which is possibly because I was a dumb child. Willing to give it another shot. It's always been interesting to be on the other side of a discussion about what is universally regarded as obviously a timeless classic.

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