By the time that I read this work published in 1925, it had long been a candidate for ‘the Great American Novel’ and had been filmed no less than four times (I’ve seen the 1974 and 2013 versions). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ostensibly, it is an American Jazz Era story of the obsessive love exhibited by the enigmatic, new-rich Jay Gatsby for lost love Daisy Buchanan, but the eponymous character does not appear until a quarter of the way into the book and disappears before the end, while the whole account is offered by Nick Carraway who is Gatsby’s neighbour and Daisy’s cousin and Nick’s narrative is clearly a self-interested version of events.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a short novel of just 170 pages, exquisitely written, a joy to read, and no doubt a rich source for students, since it has so many themes, notably disillusionment with the American Dream, and issues of class, gender, race and sexuality. A measure of the complexity of the work is that my Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction (which I read after<\/em> the story) which itself runs to 50 pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the writer of the analysis (Tony Tanner) explains\u00a0“there is a special kind of sadness to the book”<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0“to the extent that Gatsby is excessive, foolish and foredoomed, so, the whole book suggests, is America<\/em>“. He opines:\u00a0“‘The Great Gatsby’ is, I believe, the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to have come out of America”<\/em>. However, he did write that in 1990 and today I would suggest that several works by Barbara Kingsolver would be contenders for such an accolade.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n