finished reading The Great Gatsby 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

[evilcartyen@minreol.dk]

finished reading The Great Gatsby
Heard as an audiobook via Spotify and read by Scott Shepherd.

I'm not going to do a full review of this book, because - well - it's been done a hundred times before, but I will say that while I never could read it I was very very pleased with it as an audiobook. Something about the way Shepherd reads it just makes it a joy to listen to, not a slog to read, and you're with a crystal clear sense of the ambience and attitudes and sentiments of 1920s New York - from the perspective of an observer on the outskirts of the life of the rich and famous.

We follow Nick Caroway, a midwestern WW1 veteran from a good family trying to make it as a "bondsman" or stock trader in New York, more because he needs a profession or an occupation than because he needs the money. He lives next to a huge mansion owned by a Mr Gatsby, a man who throws lavish parties but remains in the background in an almost shy manner.

Gatsby, it turns out, is in love with Nick's cousin Daisy - a wealthy socialite - but she's married to Tom, a worldly and boistrous old-money athlete. He is, in turn, involved with a the wife of his mechanic who he's provided with a furnished apartment in the city - an affair which is known to everyone, which doesn't seem to bother him one bit and certainly doesn't have any real consequences for him beyond Daisy sulking and pining for her old love, Gatsby. Meanwhile Nick, the narrator, is carrying on with Daisy's friend Jordan - a professional golfer and socialite of some fame.

We follow these main characters through lots of drunken parties, lazy afternoons with a drink in hand, hushed conversations, vague business opportunities, and fake laughs and dances. So it's in part a book about that - the glitter of the 1920s wealthy elite, both old money and new.

But really it's a book about money and what it buys you; the freedom to be careless. Careless with other people's lives, with their emotions, and of course careless with money itself. Fitzgerald is very clear about this - in one memorable passage Gatsby and Nick talk about Daisy's voice:

"Gatsby turned to me rigidly: "I can't say anything in his house, old sport.." "She's got an indiscreet
voice,." I remarked. "It's full of - ." I hesitated. "Her voice is full of money,." he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl..."

Recommended!

#minreoldk #minreol