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The Great Gatsby (Modern classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: F.scott Fitzgerald
Creators: George Gershwin, William Hope
Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks
Category: Book
Buy New: £10.99
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 108723
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 4.9 x 0.4
ISBN: 9626340517
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9789626340516
ASIN: 9626340517
Publication Date: July 31, 1995
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not good Driving material. November 21, 2008
T. Patmore (Somewhere in Madagascar)
It's hard to know sometimes whether something is rubbish, or you just don't get it. For the sake of tact, I will go with the latter and believe that this book is like marmite, as the cliche goes (you either love it or hate it).
Listening to it, I could find no flowing narrative or storyline to be latched onto. I also couldn't find any little gambits or sub-plots to go with - it just seemed like swimming in treacle.
Again, it could just be me, but I did ask other people their opinion of the novel and they said either that they hated it, or that it was an acquired taste. Either way, I think it is the type of novel that needs reading or 100% concentration to be appreciated fully. Even then, a few listens are probably in order.
One thing I can acclaim, though, is the narrator: William Hope. Despite the difficult plot, Mr Hope has an amazing, compelling voice, that makes you think yourself wrong for not understanding him.
However, if you are like me and listen to a lot of audio books, then try his joint narration of 'Time Traveler's Wife' (with Laurel Lefkow), it is very enjoyable!
 The social life of the rich in the Jazz Age November 4, 2006
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Gatsby was a bootlegger and a penny stock hustler. He was "great" only in a delusive sense. Thus the title of Fitzgerald's celebrated novel is ironic, and that is something to keep in mind when reading it.
But Gatsby is seen as a step above the tony East Egg society that lived in their plush estates across the Long Island sound from his nouveau riche mansion--at least that is the revelation that narrator Nick Carraway eventually comes to as we learn from his famous line, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole dam bunch put together."
It is ironic and proper that Daisy Buchanan, the wispy, languid and privileged beauty escapes blame for the tragedy near the end of the novel. It is her class that had always escaped blame, that had always lived on in its narrow-minded, greedy luxury. We can see their class--the Buchanans and their crowd--as Eloi-like children of the robber barons. Although Gatsby was dishonest and a criminal at least he had some gumption. And in the end we see he had some sense of integrity and courage as well.
He is "great" then as compared to the listless, privileged people who had inherited much of the vast wealth that this young nation had accumulated during the westward expansion following the Civil War. Gatsby's failing and the failure in general of the rich was that they knew not what to do with their leisure and privilege. Gatsby threw lavish parties and affected an air of mystery while the Buchanans indulged in racist and class war philosophies while they pursued adulterous affairs and the mind-numbing qualities of drunkenness.
When I first read this as a young man I thought it was a rather mediocre novel. The infidelities that so drove the story were commonplace to me at a time past mid-century, and I really missed the deep irony that Fitzgerald intended. The Great Gatsby was not "great," that much was obvious; but that he was great relative to the Buchanan crowd was what I missed. He serves not only as the "up from poverty" character so often seen in Jazz Age and depression novels, but he is a more deeply realized character. Not a brutal man like most bootleg operatives, instead he is almost a dilettante bootlegger, yet a hugely successful one, so much so that hardly any of the details of his business now occupy him; indeed one of the reasons that I mistook his character upon a first reading is that the actual reality of the lifestyle of those who fed the speakeasies is not in the novel. Fitzgerald was more interested in the social life of the degenerates and how they looked upon social climbers like Jay Gatsby.
Nick the modest narrator is in-between. An educated man of the upper middle class, a graduate of Yale, he represents the objectifying device in the novel. We see everything through his eyes and through his sensibilities. Initially in ambivalent admiration of both his cousin Daisy and Gatsby, Nick eventually becomes disillusioned with their differing but shallow lifestyles and their shallow values while he comes to realize that while Gatsby is a cut above, he is still a man with a tragically limited vision.
In short, The Great Gatsby is an indictment of the Jazz Age and its easy money mentality with attendant moral corruption. Perhaps this is why it did not sell well when it was published in 1925--the jazz agers were not interested in self-portraits--but now has become a stable of American literature, and certainly Fitzgerald's most read and most celebrated novel.
Fitzgerald the man may have borne witness to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties but he did not learn its lessons. He died young in Hollywood in 1940 of a heart attack, an alcoholic trying to write pot boilers for magazines and scripts for B movies. The tragedy of Jay Gatsby in some strange way may have foreshadowed the tragedy of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
WOO HOO May 13, 2003
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is great!!! It is a must read. It is full of suspense and makes you want to keep reading. And plus the ending is very shocking.
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