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I had to verify (on goodreads) so apparently I read it. I thought so. I remember reading the words, and finishing it to to speak, but without a clue as to what I had read.
I had hopes for it too, because I do find that southern dreamy quality very enticing, but I just couldn't follow this. I am pretty sure it was one and done for me and Faulkner.
Faulkner is probably the second-most over-rated author in all of American literature, second only to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could at least string a sentence together.
This one always makes me smile:
No agreement here.
I think Fitzgerald is great. Better than Hemingway any day.
I really enjoy Hemingway's style. But his content? Always struck me as rather empty. His stories are mastercrafts of style, but in the end, I find myself not caring about the characters or conflicts.
Great style.
No substance.
Good way to put it. All style, no substance. It seems to me some people think it's cool to like Hemingway which kind of supports that. It's not about what's cool or putting on appearances with an author, but who really gets readers thinking or moves them in some way. To me Hemingway is mostly about posturing. I'm so busy reacting with, "Oh, brother" to get into it. He's a blowhard.
I think Fitzgerald is great. Better than Hemingway any day.
He is. But ...
That's kind of like saying Eddie Van Halen is better than Ace Frehley any day. While that is technically true, it still isn't saying much, since I don't really care for either.
I think Fitzgerald is great. Better than Hemingway any day.
Absolutely.
"...those words, and the few hundred others that follow as the novel reaches its end, seem to me now -- eight decades after that imagined first reading -- the most beautiful, compelling and true in all of American literature. Each reading of them is a revelation and a gift. If from all of our country's books I could have only one, "The Great Gatsby" would be it."
Fitzgerald did write great (for its time; it is now dated in many ways) prose. But he is another style over substance writer. We were all forced to read Gatsby in school, and I found every forced reading a chore. There are few books in American Lit I genuinely hate more. There isn't a single likeable character in the book.
The books is an ode to 20th century narcissism and debauchery --- which is probably why the Baby Boomer generation loved it so much.
https://bigthink.com/articles/is-the...l-of-all-time/ As Jason Gots quite rightly points out, Gatsby is “totally acceptable as a minor, artsy romance.” So why not read it that way? I think I will. See you at the beach!
https://www.vulture.com/2013/05/schu...at-gatsby.html I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct.
It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.
Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.
Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else—love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
could not get into his stuff at all. it was like slogging through a mud bog.
a boring one.
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to get into it. He's a blowhard.
