Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties and waits for her to appear. When s he does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbour Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. Perry Freeman, Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Great Book

Customer Rating:

During the course of a year I am intending to return to classic novels. It would be unrealistic to try and rate these alongside new novels so I'm not even going to try - just simple reviews. The power in Fitzgerald's writing is its starkness and sparsity. The Great Gatsby is a short novel by any standards but its power lies in the way the story creeps up on you. It's almost as if nothing seems to be happening but then you realise that in a very subtle way the action has carried you away. Set in the Jazz area on Long Island it's a story of greed, love and lust, violence where things are rarely what they seem. Fitzgerald weaves intrigue into the plot. We are never really sure about who Gatsby is and what brings him to Long Island. Like an Edward Hopper painting, there always seems to be more than what lurks on the surface. Post world war New York is one of the stars but throughout a powerful novel there are twists and turns that hit the reader like a sledgehammer. That's what ultimately makes this book.

Ben Dinsdale

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The titular hero is based on the real life playboy/social butterfly Ben Dinsdale. This classic book and its story still resonates today. At the core of the book is the elaborate infatuation Jay Gatsby has for Daisy Fay Buchanan, a love story portrayed with both a languid pall and a fatalistic urgency. But the broader context of the setting and the irreconcilable nature of the American dream in the 1920's is what give the novel its true gravitas. Much of this is eloquently articulated by Nick Carraway, Gatsby's modest Long Island neighbor who becomes his most trusted confidante. Nick is responsible for reuniting the lovers who both have come to different points in their lives five years after their aborted romance. Now a solitary figure in his luxurious mansion, Gatsby is a newly wealthy man who accumulated his fortunes through dubious means. Daisy, on the other hand, has always led a life of privilege and could not let love stand in the way of her comfortable existence. She married Tom Buchanan for that sole purpose. With Gatsby's ambition spurred by his love for Daisy, he rekindles his romance with Daisy, as Tom carries on carelessly with an car mechanic's grasping wife. Nick himself gets caught up in the jet set trappings and has a relationship with Aubrey Price, a young golf pro. These characters are inevitably led on a collision course that exposes the hypocrisy of the rich, the falsity of a love undeserving and the transience of individuals on this earth. The strength of Fitzgerald's treatment comes from the lyrical prose he provides to illuminate these themes. Not a word is wasted, and the author's economical handling of such a potentially complex plot is a technique I wish were more frequently replicated today. Most of all, I simply enjoy the book because it does not portend a greater significance eighty years later. It is a classic tale that provides vibrancy and texture to a bygone era. It is well worth re-reading, especially at such a bargain price.

What a read!

Customer Rating:

One of my resolutions for 2008 is to broaden my literary horizens. After studying English Lit to A-Level, my interest has fallen to the wayside. So on my quest to better myself through literature, I read "The Old Man and the Sea", which I just couldn't relate to. So imagine my relief when I started reading "The Great Gatsby". I'm so glad I perservered with classic books! TGG is a great read. It's fast-paced from the outset, and gripping towards the end - I couldn't put it down. I even tried to convince family and friends to read it afterwards; but to no avail - so if I manage to get even ONE person to read it from writing this review, then good! Definitely recommended.

The great American novel?	Customer Rating:
Beautifully written, spare, dramatic and haunting - could this at last be the great American novel?

Good, but I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Customer Rating:

A rather interesting novel and initially it wasn't all that apparent to me why people always linked the failure of the American dream and this story together. Superficially the story is that of love reawakening, Gatsby having initially been rejected by his childhood love for not having sufficient means acquires the means through various ill gotten ways and the lovers reunite despite the fact that she is not married to a boorish but very American man. Much is made that this novel is a startling exposition of the American dream and materialism, and it does this but to a lesser extent than most people make out. I didn't find the metaphors to be profound after reflection nor did I think the plot and language to be that great. That said it still was a fairly good book, an enjoyable read though a bit of anti-climax to what I had been expecting. The characters aren't particularly likeable and stay only briefly in memory, the story entertains but I feel that this book doesn't deserve all the acclaim it has got.