Rating: 
Summary: What does a man have to do to get attention?
Review: A rich man, a middle class man, a tennis player, an adulterist, a confused freeloader of a wife, and story that involves them all in a toned down but twisted sort of way. At first glance this book seems to revolve around a love interest between Nick,(Our middle class man) and Daisy, (Our tennis player) while Gatsby (the extremely wealthy man) is our third party who's fancy parties help them together. But slowly this novel turns, and sends the reader into a situation where Nick Carraway is a third party in the Great Gatsby's life, and a love situation that will have the reader hooked.....
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful Prose Devoid of Intelligent Content
Review: The Great Gatsby was voted number two on the list of 100 greatest of the twentieth century and I never questioned this rating until confronted by an influentual college professor who made me examine the novel more closely. Many of the thoughts I now have on Fitzgerald and Gatsby I owe to him and I think it would be good to share them and allow people who read these reviews to rethink Gatsby somewhat. The fact is that Fitzgerald's "great" novel of the "American Dream" has serious problems that make it a questionable text for number two on such a list, especially considering it is placed above such novels as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.From the beginning of the novel, we are in the hands of a first person narrator in Nick Carraway, an empty shallow young man from the midwest who moves to the east to try his hand at the "American Dream." The problem is that although most people would regard Nick as a shallow character, Fitzgerald doesn't seem to offer an underlying critique of this moral void inside of his character but instead forces the reader to accept what Nick says at face value. Then we meet Tom and Daisy Bucchanan. Tom is the quintessential Aryan prototype spouting racist propaganda about how it has been scientifically proven that the blond haired blue eyed Nordic male is superior in every way to other races, and again there is no satiric edge from Fitzgerald to say that Tom is not correct in his beliefs and assumptions. Then we reach the introduction of Gatsby and the melodramatic love story of Gatsby and Daisy. Gatsby is the nouveau riche who throws large excessive parties for anyone who will come to his mansion hoping that Daisy will someday show up. Fitzgerald goes down a list of participants in those parties and most of the people there are Eastern Europeans. This is a criticism of the parties in Fitzgerald's prose and begins to venture into the anti-semitic areas of the novel. The introduction of Meyer Wolfsheim, the stereotypical Jew seals the deal on that. We also soon discover that what attracts Gatsby to Daisy is not a human bond of understanding and friendship, but the fact that Daisy's voice jingles like money; and yet, people seem to view this love affair as stirring and tragic. The sad thing about the book is that all of its characters are shallow and money hungry. There is not a redeming figure in the book though the narrator Nick would like to say that the hero is Gatsby. Gatsby was all right in the end. It was what prayed on him that was bad. This is Fitzgerald's judgment. If this is the quintessential novel about the American Dream, if the lust of Gatsby is our lust as Americans and the love story of Daisy and Gatsby the type of love we as a people aspire to, we're in a great deal of trouble in this country. When books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come under attack in high schools across for using the word "Nigger" and others such as The Grapes of Wrath are banned for using profanity such as "Christ," The Great Gatsby, which is a far more damaging and subversive novel, slips by unnoticed. I'm not for censorship in any form, but we must think about what we want to tell children or any other students about America. While Huckleberry Finn and the Grapes of Wrath are being banned yet are permeated with important and positive messages about the meaning of America, The Great Gatsby is a staple in cirriculum everywhere saying that this is really what America is about. Part of the problem is that Fitzgerald's prose is so exquisitely poetic that the themes of the book sometimes disappear beneath the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg or get clouded by a green light at the end of a pier. Half the time if you stop to think, you can't even figure out what Fitzgerald is talking about. "And so we float on, boats against the current borne ceaselessly back into the past." At the end of examining the novel in an American literature class in college my professor asked the students what this line meant. No one could come up with a satisfactory answer. The teacher who had been teaching The Great Gatsby in class for twenty years told us that he had never met anyone would could tell him what it meant. Perhaps the novel should have fallen to a lower spot on the list of the twentieth century's greatest novels.
Rating:
Summary: How about "The Very Good Gatsby"
Review: I don't think "The Great Gatsby" is a perfect novel, but it is better than most I have read. I enjoyed the story (in as much as a story of this kind can be enjoyed). Reccomended.
Rating:
Summary: The Great Gatsby is a well written book
Review: I just finished listening to the unabridged audio version of The Great Gatsby. I have started listening to the audio version of books, that I may never get time to read, on my drive to and from work each day. I have to say that while listening to "The Great Gatsby" I actually loved driving to and from work. The commute was the best part of the day and strangely I was actually glad when I got caught in traffic. F. Scott Fitzgerald's writting style and use of words was beautiful and the story was very interesting as well. I found the Great Gatsby's desire and methods to reunite with the lost love from his past quite touching. The last page of the book was so well written I kept rewinding the tape and listening to it again and again. Don't ask me why I am not giving it five stars. It was close to five, but just did not make it, and I can't quite put my finger on it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Epitome of American Literary Achievement
Review: Nick Carraway is an unsuspecting Long Island-dweller living in a small house that is sandwiched between mansions. Through two old acquaintances, Tom Buchanan and his wife, Daisy, he learns that one of his neighbors is the rich, extravagant Jay Gatsby, who soon invites him to one of the periodic late night parties on his property. At this party, he befriends Gatsby and soon becomes intertwined in his story. He finds that Gatsby's money was earned through illicit methods, and sees his friend's incongruously idealistic character. Finally, he watches as Gatsby is confronted by his past in the form of Daisy Buchanan. During WWI, five years before the events recounted in The Great Gatsby took place, Jay Gatsby was a soldier stationed in Louisville. There, he met Daisy, and in his romanticism, he believed that it was everlasting, mutual love at first sight. Four years later, when Gatsby discovered Daisy's marriage, he moved to Long Island, where his past lover and her husband were now residing. We see Jay Gatsby's incredible idealism, inharmonious with the rest of his character, which is, to me, the most significant characterization in the entire novel. It is the one aspect of the story that allows the reader to keep reading, feeling that everything might be eventually work out. How Gatsby hopes against hope, believes against belief, that Daisy, after five years, still loves him, is a tribute to the human spirit. His complete confidence during his confrontation with Tom Buchanan shows the incredible ability within us all to trust in a reflection of the past. It makes us all Gatsby's friends, makes us hope with him, wish with him, have faith in him. Gatsby's romanticism makes readers aspire to or even believe that they have this incredible love of "a green light at the end of the dock", a symbol of the hope that has been lost and yet is still there. I would recommend this book to everyone, although some slight racism and sexism common at the time the novel was written may discourage sensitive readers. The literary style and word usage is, for lack of a better description, incredible, and the book's plotting is superb. The Great Gatsby realistically portrays both the best and the worst of human attributes and allows any reader to identify with the characters, no matter how far-fetched this might seem. F. Scott Fitzgerald's book is the epitome of American literary accomplishment and a must read for any serious booklover.
Rating:
Summary: An American classic
Review: How can you define classics in a literature of a nation who was born a bit more than two hundred years ago? A tale like TGG could be the right answer. Even if I have found the track a bit boring, it is the most representative subject that can be defined American epics. But what I really appreciate about Fitzgerald is his style of writing, the best I have ever met in American and English literature, which also retains its meaningful form (but in that case I have to pay much credit to the translator) in the Italian version. The final short digression about the green light is one of the most often seen quotations.
Rating:
Summary: A Jazz Age Delight
Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is somewhat paralleled by the character (Jay Gatsby) he creates in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby throws lavish parties and lives one of the most extreme lifestyles fictionalized during the Jazz Age. Although Fitzgerald's life was tragic at times, he seems to have drawn the content of the novel from his creative literary genius as well. Because of its amazing story and craftsmanship, The Great Gatsby is the type of novel that deserves to stay in print for as long as people are reading books.
The novel is a bit of a love story gone wrong, mixed with the budding friendship of a common bond salesman (Nick Carraway) with the notorious underground gambler and namesake of the novel (Jay Gatsby). The two are somewhat confidants, yet the audience never knows if Gatsby is totally truthful with Carraway. Gatsby finds that Carraway's distant cousin (Daisy Buchanan) is a lost love who has married another man (Tom Buchanan). It seems as though his pursuit is worthless, but the soap-opera feel of the book helps the story continue to flow. Tom is also having an affair; his mistress is a low-class woman named Myrtle Wilson who lives in a gas station halfway between the two major areas that set the novel (East Egg and West Egg). Gatsby goes on a mission to reclaim the love of his life, almost an attempt to eternally grasp happiness. Carraway also has a somewhat love interest, a lady golfer who often lands herself in trouble. A novel is complete without unexpected disaster and The Great Gatsby is no exception. Twists of fates and other accidents play into the story as the reader's heart beats faster and is too involved to close the book.
Other plot elements allow Fitzgerald's novel to be highly esteemed. He magically mixes carefully crafted symbolism, dramatic irony, complex plot, figurative language, and vivid descriptions in such a bold yet intriguing way. A fantastic cast of characters work together move the story forward, although one man (Carraway) does the actual narration. After reading this amazing novel, any reader would wish to travel back to the 1920s and attend one of Gatsby's wild parties or befriend one of the other characters.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps Fitzgerald's best
Review: This novel's best point is Fitzgerald's writing style. Having such a light and lucid pen, Fitzgerald manages to describe scenes in such a way as to make them come to life. He is also very subtle in his use of sarcasm (mostly demonstrated through the narrators remarks on those around him). This ornate style is in contrast to the spare quality of the plot. Basically, the story follows Nick Carraway's involvement in the relationship between Jay Gatsby and his --Gatsby's-- long time love (who is a married woman). It plays out in a way that is very similar to Greek tragedies (imagine Oedipus Rex). However, simple this may sound, it plays out in an interesting way, and is somewhat refreshing when compared to the modern day four-plot-twist-per-book style of writing (not to say that there aren't good modern writers; there are, of course). Another interesting aspect of this book is the idea of wealth, or the idealization of wealth. All of the characters involved in this story are either bent on gaining, or flaunting money. Gatsby throws lavish parties, and drives around in a distinctive automobile. Nick is looking to earn a fortune in the supposedly limitless city of New York. Fitzgerald even lays down a sort of classist line (through Gatsby's lips, I believe): "The rich get richer, and the poor get children." It follows that within the book there are thin, nearly invisible, lines drawn between all the characters of different classes. I would recomend this novel for anybody who is interested in clever writing. I'd also recomend this to anyone who's interested in the expatriot writers. For while Fitzgerald is in contrast to Hemingway, they almost seem to compliment each other in defining the time period. I would also recomend this to anybody who's interested in classic american literature, for it is very much a hallmark American story.
Rating:
Summary: Some say it's over-rated, I say it's genius!
Review: I'm not an avid reader, but I absolutely adored Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'. The symbolism, time period, tragedy, question of mental conciousness, etc. kept me thinking about it for hours. I thought this book was extremely well written and perfect for any literature class.
Rating:
Summary: A world painted through words.
Review: I'm a high school student who read this book by choice, as we must read several books of our own as part of our English class.
I enjoyed this book tremendously. Fitzgerald has an amazing talent for drawing you into the worlds of the characters. The characters aren't especially deep but perhaps that's what makes them so intriguing. At first when introduced to them, especially Gatsby, you might think " Oh how shallow" but when examining yourself do some of the emotions not feel strangely familiar?
This book is proof that money does nothing but create a world that covers pain with a nearly sheer curtain that can be ripped by raw emotions, revealing universal human desires, fears and mortality.
I will definately read this book again, certain to discover more and more each time.
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