One of the books I love the most turns 100 years old today! Happiest of Birthdays to THE GREAT GATSBY!
I have spent years and years–decades–picking this novel apart and trying to get inside to the cogs and gears…to the scaffolding. I know if I just read it one more time the secret of its success will be made clear to me. Finally! I will pick this novel over for the rest of my life. I already know this. I am at peace with that knowledge. And I will continue to pick it back up again and again.
Not only will I pick it up and read it again and again and again, but I will probably continue to buy different copies of it. And I am halfway through writing an homage to it…a queer retelling perhaps?
I can’t believe it’s been a hundred years. I just have to think about this book to bring the words back up from the dark recesses of my otherwise untrustworthy memory. I have my favourite passages and I reread the last sentences over and over once I find myself again at the end of the pages during yet another rereading.
FAVOURITE LINE:
“Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”
The first time I ever read that line, I was perhaps 14…maybe 15. It stopped me cold. I envisioned not only the magic of the women and the room and the wind and the curtains…but also of the author sitting at his desk clacking away at his typewriter. I imagine him stopping after writing out that line and giving himself a soft punch of pride on his shoulder, a la Anthony Michael Hall’s character Brian Johnson when he finishes writing his essay for Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club. I know you know what I mean.
The fact that Fitzgerald did such an exceptional job in such a short story mesmerizes me. It is a tome of a book stuffed inside an itty bitty living space. It’s like magic how much he fit into his little world. Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I don’t think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport…I pick up a copy of THE GREAT GATSBY and I start reading…
Happy Birthday to THE GREAT GATSBY. F SCOTT FITZGERALD will always be here. His legacy includes one of the most beloved stories of the modern (or any other) age. I’m pretty sure magic like that only happens once in a hundred years or so. 🙂
So we beat on…
KEVIN CRAIG 