Finished reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Had heard a lot about this book so I picked it up at the Book Fair in Kolkata (India). The novel being short, I thought I would complete it within 2-3 days. However, it wasn’t long before I realized this book wasn’t a page turner. I hadn’t read any dense/tough literature past school when we had English Literature as a subject. So, without guidebooks and teachers, this is the first time I read a book that is taught in school.

Overall, I loved the story. Love novels aren’t for me, but this book wasn’t that – it was about the hollowness of ‘Upper class’ people. I loved the turn the story took at the end. It left me with a feeling of emptiness – the book succeeds in making you feel about the book.

However, being a non-native speaker of English, I had a lot of trouble understanding the English. It was really REALLY tough for me. It was just too much symbolism. Almost every other sentence is symbolical – nothing is conveyed at face value. The author doesn’t say “He was shot and died”. Instead he uses symbolical language of “The Sun looked ugly to him and kissed his body…he couldn’t see the rose just like he couldn’t see the figure approaching him…the leaves pushed the mattress on the pool tracing a red line along with it” or something like that. That was a LOT for someone like me. I have marked every single word and phrase that I couldn’t understand in the book and its a lot – it will take me a month to decipher the vocabulary and symbolism of the book. I’ll be honest, I don’t like this much abstraction – language should be lucid, if what you say requires me to sit with a dictionary or ponder 10 minutes about it, it is either Philosophy or superfluous writing (this is just my opinion). I have heard that the book didn’t sell well when he was alive but only did so during WW2 when the book was given out for free to soldiers in America. I can clearly see why it wasn’t popular. However, this book is basically an English lesson which I will gladly take. Hopefully, writing down the meanings of phrases and words I couldn’t understand will make my English stronger.

by Ilovetorockyou