The Great Gatsby

I’ve just finished ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F.Scott Fitzgerald. I was pointed to it by a friend and then driven on by the striking quote on the back cover, “A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel” (are all such cover recommendations striking?).
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a novel about the interaction between the past and the future, about reality and illusion, and identity.
It is set in the 1920’s in the locale of Long Island, New York. The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, who has just moved into this peculiar place;

“It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.”

It is about a character that Nick comes to know, his neighbour, Gatsby… or is it really about Nick and his hopes and fears.

“He [Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The prose is wonderful, each phrase carrying a sense of time and place, a tone that captures a spirit of liveliness.

The penguin ‘classics’ edition also contains a most helpful introduction, though it is about half as long as the novel itself.