Sean

Idle Book Club Episode 5: The Great Gatsby

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That would an interesting discussion point: does The Great Gatsby deserve it's position as a 'timeless' classic? Some of the themes dealt with in the book (greed, man being his worst enemy, trying to escape from your own history), are certainly timeless and will always remain relevant as long as there is a human society, but other aspects of the novel are so deeply entrenched in the Roaring 20's culture that they feel wildly out of place for the modern reader.

I think Gatsby gets thrown in there as an unquestioned classic because there isn't a lot of subtly with how the book is written, which makes it one of the easier 'classics' for people to read (and explains why it's so often assigned as required reading for teenagers). I'm not trying to disparage Fitzgerald's writing ability in any way, he clearly was very talented, but he is one of the more straightforward writers that I've ever read. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; not everyone can (or should) write like a Meville or a Dostoevsky, and bury their themes behind obscure symbolism and heavy exposition. I just can't help but think that based on how basic the narrative of Gatsby is, and the fact that many authors since Fitzgerald have tackled similar issues with a more nuanced approach, that The Great Gatsby will slowly fade away as a 'classic' over the next few generations as other books take it's place.

To be fair, I haven't read this book since high school. Maybe as an adult I'll have a better appreciation for it and its place in American literature.

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Maybe not in the themes, but Fitzgerald has a clear and careful style of writing that I think will continue to be recognized as great until the English language changes sufficiently to obscure that, like it did with certain Victorian authors.

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Kind of bummed at this book choice. :<

It has to be one of the most widely read literary novels you could pick, and proportionally difficult to discuss anything original about.

(It's a great book though, and one of my all-time favorites! Just not what I'd hope for in a book club.)

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That would an interesting discussion point: does The Great Gatsby deserve it's position as a 'timeless' classic? Some of the themes dealt with in the book (greed, man being his worst enemy, trying to escape from your own history), are certainly timeless and will always remain relevant as long as there is a human society, but other aspects of the novel are so deeply entrenched in the Roaring 20's culture that they feel wildly out of place for the modern reader.

I think Gatsby gets thrown in there as an unquestioned classic because there isn't a lot of subtly with how the book is written, which makes it one of the easier 'classics' for people to read (and explains why it's so often assigned as required reading for teenagers). I'm not trying to disparage Fitzgerald's writing ability in any way, he clearly was very talented, but he is one of the more straightforward writers that I've ever read. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; not everyone can (or should) write like a Meville or a Dostoevsky, and bury their themes behind obscure symbolism and heavy exposition. I just can't help but think that based on how basic the narrative of Gatsby is, and the fact that many authors since Fitzgerald have tackled similar issues with a more nuanced approach, that The Great Gatsby will slowly fade away as a 'classic' over the next few generations as other books take it's place.

To be fair, I haven't read this book since high school. Maybe as an adult I'll have a better appreciation for it and its place in American literature.

Please re-read it now that you're not a child! There is a lot more going on than at least I was aware of as a 16 year old.

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Please re-read it now that you're not a child! There is a lot more going on than at least I was aware of as a 16 year old.

I'm almost afraid to re-read it, because most likely my take away will be completely different now than it was ten years ago, and then I'd have to admit to myself that not only am I aging but also that I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was a teenager. Growing up kind of blows.

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I had never read this before. I enjoyed it immensely.

The style is vivid, but economical; it's the kind of writing I most admire.

I think the experience was enhanced by my reading it almost entirely on trains in and around NYC, including bits of Long Island. During passages about the local geography, I had the sound just outside my window.

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That would an interesting discussion point: does The Great Gatsby deserve it's position as a 'timeless' classic? Some of the themes dealt with in the book (greed, man being his worst enemy, trying to escape from your own history), are certainly timeless and will always remain relevant as long as there is a human society, but other aspects of the novel are so deeply entrenched in the Roaring 20's culture that they feel wildly out of place for the modern reader.

I think Gatsby gets thrown in there as an unquestioned classic because there isn't a lot of subtly with how the book is written, which makes it one of the easier 'classics' for people to read (and explains why it's so often assigned as required reading for teenagers). I'm not trying to disparage Fitzgerald's writing ability in any way, he clearly was very talented, but he is one of the more straightforward writers that I've ever read. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; not everyone can (or should) write like a Meville or a Dostoevsky, and bury their themes behind obscure symbolism and heavy exposition. I just can't help but think that based on how basic the narrative of Gatsby is, and the fact that many authors since Fitzgerald have tackled similar issues with a more nuanced approach, that The Great Gatsby will slowly fade away as a 'classic' over the next few generations as other books take it's place.

To be fair, I haven't read this book since high school. Maybe as an adult I'll have a better appreciation for it and its place in American literature.

But don't you think its ease is also because to a certain extent it has become our archetype for our cultural knowledge of the twenties? It's maybe not a difficult novel (though man, its central formal ambiguity is fun to think about), but that could also be because it, metonymically(spellingmightbeoff)-speaking, the constructions and historical relations it poses arn't vague and in fact are the ones we (I mean Americans) go to at the drop of a hat. (like, say the need for some knowledge of class mobility in the 19th century to really understand the comic-tragedy of Great Expectations.)

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A rainy Saturday provided an opportunity to read Gatsby a second time and so I did.

It reinforced what I felt during my first reading: beside the strong societal commentary, this book reads like the meticulous destruction of the notion that conscious desires can ever be the honest expression of what fullfills an individual.

In the context of the book, this pretty much spells a death sentence on the concept of genuine Love at first sight, or at least the concept of a mutually shared affections that would both express and provide meaning to someone's life.

During the course of the book, most characters feel attracted to each-others for the wrong reasons and bind themselves together for even worse ones: they rarely truly know each other (or care enough to find out) and they never share world views or aspirations. They either surrender to each other on pathetically superficial motives (Daisy's falls for Gatsby because of shirts) or because they succumb to the fear that the opportunity presented to them might be the ticket to the perfect coupling and existence they've been waiting for.

It doesn't mean that they are superficial characters, but they are trapped in social and personal interactions that only exists because of superficial details.

Ironically, one of the most honest feeling displayed is Tom's attraction for Myrtle: it doesn't feel utilitarian and even if Nick mostly highlights the crudeness and vulgarity of the relationship, it came out like a true expression of who Tom and Myrtle are; which is a rare occurence in a book where characters act like they think they should.

What felt even more striking to me is that characters who are enlightened enough to notice that Gatsby, Daisy and nearly everybody are mislead have their own sense of drive and desire poisoned by that knowledge: Nick and Jordan's romance - the only one that felt like it could be genuine - seemed rotten in the egg by the doubt that their mutual feelings just might be as fake and as shallow as the one they witness around them.

To see their will crumble and their potentiality unexplored was heartwrenching.

That particular angle was what felt most valuable to me.

An interesting companion piece to that book might be the movie adaptation by Stephen Fry of Vile Bodies: also set between the two wars albeit in England, Bright Young Things explores similar character and ideas. The key difference is that it features a fiercer protagonist and that the author shows way more empathy for the characters engulfed in the lifestyle it condemns.

It is less efficient and analytical as well as more formulaic than Gastby, but that may be revealing of each countries way of looking at its past.

Or not, I'm not literate or knowledgable enough to tell.

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But don't you think its ease is also because to a certain extent it has become our archetype for our cultural knowledge of the twenties? It's maybe not a difficult novel (though man, its central formal ambiguity is fun to think about), but that could also be because it, metonymically(spellingmightbeoff)-speaking, the constructions and historical relations it poses arn't vague and in fact are the ones we (I mean Americans) go to at the drop of a hat. (like, say the need for some knowledge of class mobility in the 19th century to really understand the comic-tragedy of Great Expectations.)

That's a really astute point and is something that I did not consider. I still need to actually reread this book, but I will definitely keep what you said in mind while I'm reading. Your point is true for really all kinds of literature. An example from my own reading past is with Russian literature, which is notoriously hard for American audiences to read. One of the major complaints that I always hear when someone is struggling with a Dostoevsky or a Lermontov (besides the quality of the Russian-English translation) is that the author expects you to be familiar with over 200 years of Russian history. I tried to read Crime and Punishment in high school and did not understand a word of what I read. It wasn't until two years later, when I had taken a number of Russian history classes, that I tried to reread CP and finally had a eureka moment of understanding.

Books--especially those that are written by foreign authors--cannot be read out of context, and I think that you're right to highlight the context in which we're read Gatsby. I just really need to sit down and reread this thing so that I can actually form an adult opinion on it.

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I hate to judge a movie based on a two minute trailer, but, this does not look very good.

I had the opposite reaction, I have watched it about 10 times today. I didn't think much of the first trailer but watching this has me interested in it. I expect it to be style over substance but I've already seen a take on Gatsby that was literally true to the book, word for word. Also I love movies with a strong sense of style (even if the substance is lacking) which this trailer has. Not sure about Toby Maguire as Jack though but I think Da Caprio can pull off Gatsby and Joel Edgerton Tom.

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Yeah, I haven't picked up GG yet to re-read for this month's club, but I'm kinda entranced that Luhrmann is doing something interesting with it rather than playing it straight. It's really hard to capture the sense of opulence—riding the line between post-war optimism and foreboding decadence—that we think of in the gilded age, and going balls out like that seems like a promising way of getting that across. Maybe that'll change once I re-read the book and get more into the nuances that could be easily drowned out in that kind of treatment, but I'm hopeful!

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I guess I just get really turned off by this type of oversaturation of style. I understand what Luhrmann is going for, and maybe the film is actually successful, but the trailer just rubs me the wrong way. It looks like Moulin Rouge x100.

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Speaking of oversaturation, and I dont know if this is a legitimate thing, but this movie has a surprising amount of... color. After watching the trailer i realized I imagined this being more washed out, similar to The Master.

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The recent holiday gave me a chance to actually reread this book. I sat down on Christmas Eve morning and didn't get up until a few hours later when I read the whole thing. At this point, I still can't decide if I actually liked it or not. I kept rolling my eyes during Nick's opening section and especially during Tom's monologue on the superiority of the white race (although I think Fitzgerald wanted the reader to have this reaction), but once I got into the book, I couldn't stop reading until I finished.

It's so strange to revisit a book that I haven't thought about in over 10 years. I remember being 14 and so confused by all the characters' actions and not really understanding the sexual subtext that is present in everyone's relationships. I also remember hating, HATING Daisy as a kid and I was pleasantly surprised at how sympathetic she came off as now that I'm older.

I'm also even more wary of the Baz Luhrman movie. Everything in the book is so straightforward and contains surprisingly little melodrama. I was expecting it to take forever for Daisy and Gatsby to reconnect and even longer for them to reveal their relationship, but all of those events happen fairly quickly and the novel never feels like it's wasting your time. The way the movie looks (or at least the way the trailer was edited) all of these emotional scenes that are handled with such subtly in the book are blown up 10x on film. Whether that was Luhrman's intent or just the fault of visuals being so much stronger than the written word (and therefore easier to abuse), is something that I'd have to wait in see in the finished movie.

I'm really looking forward to this discussion because Gatsby is so unlike any other book that's been previously talked about. I'd especially be interested in hearing if everyone agrees that this book still holds up as a classic of America literature, because that's definitely something that I'm still wrestling with.

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Hmm. I read this not too long ago, but aside from the beautiful use of language, it didn't move me. As others have noted, it's hard to care for the characters for one thing.

I'm eager to try and understand what I'm missing, though, and so will endeavour to try and take part in this book club. (Is the Great Gatsby public domain, btw?)

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It isn't available in public domain, though this is a link that will allow you to get it legally let you get it as an ebook through more questionable means. You just need Calibre to convert it from HTML.

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If it's not public domain in your country, no link is going to give it to you legally unless it's to a bookstore.

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Oh, hey, great, I haven't been able to listen to the podcast since I don't have time and/or money to read the books. Now, I can, because I already have. I should add every novel I own to the suggestion thread so I can keep listening.

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In other Great Gatsby movie news, it was announced recently that Jay-Z will be composing the music for the film:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/too-dope-for-words-jay-z-is-the-ideal-composer-for-the-great-gatsby-score/266739/

I feel pretty neutral about this whole announcement, but I really like the idea of an extremely wealthy, famous black man writing the score for a movie that is basically 'white people problems' personified (although I'm sure that's the juxtaposition Luhrman wants you to think of).

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In other Great Gatsby movie news, it was announced recently that Jay-Z will be composing the music for the film:

http://www.theatlant...y-score/266739/

I feel pretty neutral about this whole announcement, but I really like the idea of an extremely wealthy, famous black man writing the score for a movie that is basically 'white people problems' personified (although I'm sure that's the juxtaposition Luhrman wants you to think of).

Hearing that has gotten me even more excited for the movie. The way this is going it will either be my favourite or most hated movie of 2013.

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