The Great Gatsby CD

Rating:
Summary: Good actors are not necessarily the best readers
Review: The fourth star is actually for the quality of the novel itself; "The Great Gatsby" is one of my favorite novels and surely the best in American literature. Every line in Fitzgerald's novel has a meaning and a purpose. The reading on this audio book was not the worst I've ever heard, but Tim Robbins needed a good director to work out the many problems in his reading. While there were generally good voice characterizations (except for the initial chapters' readings of Daisy and Jordan--who sounded like a very exaggerated version of Southern women but improved as the novel went on), the narrator's voice varied from sounding bored to a tempo more in keeping with Nick Carraway's feelings about the people in the story. Sometimes there were problems differentiating Nick's voice from Gatsby's, and Gatsby mostly sounded like someone falling asleep. In addition to characterization problems, there were small problems in sentence phrasing--perhaps caused by turning the page--and in pronunciation consistency. I suppose it's all right to have a character's name pronounced in a non-traditional way (as Wolfsheim's was), but to have it move back and forth between two pronunciations even when the same character is supposed to be saying it seemed to me a problem that a good and conscientious director could have solved.

Rating:
Summary: A fine audio adaptation
Review: Tim Robbins deserves very high praise for his masterful voice characterizations. Robbins brings Fitzgerald's masterful prose to life, continually pulling the listener into the world of the novel. In many ways, the story of the book is just as relevant today as it was when it was first published. Highly recommended!