Ever since I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I’ve been obsessed.  With its 1920s glamour and star-crossed lovers, who doesn’t love it?!  But really, it’s so much more than that.  Despite Daisy and Gatsby’s mutual love for each other, a love that endured years of separation, it is ultimately not enough.  Daisy is married to Tom and is not strong enough to leave him.  And Gatsby, despite everything, isn’t strong enough either, though he puts up a good façade; no one knows who he really is.  There’s also Nick, Daisy’s cousin, who befriends Gatsby, in awe of the fortune and lavish parties, wishing that he could be just like him.  But after Nick is thrown into Gatsby’s world and starts to see things behind the façade, he realizes that it’s not what he wants after all.

What I find most interesting of the novel is that there’s so much that is not said, so much that the reader has to think about and realize on their own.  It’s truly an amazing work of fiction that Fitzgerald didn’t get nearly enough praise for during his life.

I’ve been waiting for about three years for this film to come out, and thankfully, I have less than a month to go!  You can bet that I’ll thumb through the novel again beforehand so it’ll be fresh in my mind, and then, off to the theater I will go!  I leave you with a quote from The Great Gatsby…perhaps one of my favorites.

“He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly.  It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.  It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.  It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby