The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald ; edited by David Crystal and Derek Strange with an introduction by Anthony Burgess - Softcover

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140813349 ISBN 13: 9780140813340

Publisher: Penguin English, 1991

Synopsis

Part of the "Penguin Authentic Texts" series of books that examine English language fiction, focusing on literature and language in literature. This book includes notes on language to help clarify text for both native and non-native readers of English. "The Great Gatsby" depicts an American society obsessed with the acquisition of wealth and devoid of moral structure.

About this title

Review:

In 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned". That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned and, above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

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

Review:

"It’s an absolute gem and stands head and shoulders above the others. With its thick creamy pages and gorgeous black, gold and mint green cover design inspired by pieces from the Tiffany archive, not only is it a pleasure to hold but for once it delivers on the publisher’s promise to “evoke the beauty and romance, glamour and luxury of the Roaring Twenties depicted in the novel"" (Evening Standard)

"The Great Gatsby remains not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth...a gilded society intoxicated by wealth, dancing its way into the Great Depression." (The Times)

"Gatsby is a connoisseur's guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age, but it's also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story... A haunting meditation on aspiration, disillusionment, romantic love - and a blistering exposé of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America's true "business": "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"" (The Times)

"It is a marvellously suggestive novel...a parable of modern America, and by extension of modern life" (Daily Telegraph)

"The first and greatest modern novel, it has beautiful women, lavish parties, romance, betrayal and murder woven together in an intricately structured plot. A prescient comment on the dying days of a gilded age that is brilliant entertainment with a very eloquent insight" (Mirror)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin English
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140813349
• ISBN 13: 9780140813340
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190
• Editor: Crystal David, Strange Derek