The Great Gatsby: a too short review

A couple of years ago–too late, if you ask me–I finally decided to read The Great Gatsby, and I was struck by it. I'm proposing here a translation of my short review, originally written in Italian on my Goodreads account. I apologize in advance for the brevity, which cannot fully capture the vast array of themes and insights this book offers, but I hope it will still encourage you to pick up this stunning work. Enjoy your reading!

I waited too long to read this novel, until I stumbled upon the audiobook the other day and started listening to it. It immediately won me over and I got it in hard copy. There is so much to say that it's impossible to reduce everything to a few characters. Fitzgerald's prose captures scenes as though they were framed in paintings, preserving them in poetic snapshots. Even the characters themselves occasionally seem fossilized in their poses. It is no coincidence that photography, the defining art form of the 1920s, provides a fitting metaphor for the Roaring Twenties—a backdrop of jazz, flappers, and the dazzling allure of post-war New York.

The narrative flows like an intoxicating river of alcohol, veiling everything in a gossamer mist, through opulent parties suffused with a fog of superficiality. The intrinsic vanity of a society built on noisy appearances becomes evident, yet Gatsby—despite being the architect of such spectacles—remains a perpetual outsider. This Trimalchian protagonist, revealed to us in slow, deliberate layers, is driven not by decadence but by the loneliness of his desire, green as hope itself. The novel is suffused with the color green: it is the glow of the light across the bay from Daisy’s home, a symbol of longing. But green also evokes the acidic tones of German Expressionist art, like the stark brushstrokes of Kirchner’s urban women, or the cold glare of neon—an unsettling hue devoid of romantic warmth.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Five women on the street, 1913

Gatsby is cloaked in a brilliant aura of mystery, a carefully constructed ideal of what one aspires to be, rather than what one truly is. His story becomes an allegory for the American Dream, the fragile illusion of boundless opportunity that shatters against the unyielding wall of reality.

Nick, Tom, Daisy, Jordan, Jay, Myrtle, and Wilson are like marionettes, their strings manipulated within this tale. The story smells of morning dew after an all-night party, the lingering scent of tobacco on crumpled clothes tossed carelessly to the floor, rain-soaked lawns, and flowers brutally severed beneath the pale glow of a June moon. Summer dominates the narrative, its stifling heat a persistent motif. The oppressive warmth clouds the characters’ judgments, stripping away their facades in fleeting, rain-washed moments of authenticity. Some of the novel’s most poignant and enduring scenes unfold in the rain, rendered by Fitzgerald like vivid photographs etched in memory.

Much is left unspoken, inviting readers to inhabit the silences, to piece together the story’s unstated truths. Thus, the novel's haunting final sentence offers a melancholy summation of its themes—a stunningly visual symbol of humanity’s ceaseless striving toward an elusive, eternal, and bittersweet longing.

The Great Gatsby is a novel for idealists, a bittersweet smile in the face of one’s shattered illusions. Whether you're an eternal optimist or a disillusioned dreamer, you'll find between these pages a tale that speaks to that dreamy part in all of us, torn between the endless possibilities of the future and the forever lost prospect of what it could have been.