Classic Tuesdays: The Great Gatsby

As cliche as it sounds, The Great Gatsby is one of my all-time favourite novels. It’s The Book, the one I reread every year in the summer, when I’m feeling down, when I see it on the shelf and fancy injecting a little poetry into my day. Gatsby is the book I turn to when I don’t know where else to turn. In the sticky heat of summer, I think of Daisy Buchanan and the day it all came unstuck, and I wonder how anyone could ever do anything in that kind of heat.

I love Nick Carraway’s sweet lyricism, the way he romanticises everyone and everything he comes across. I love that he tries so hard to prove himself as a narrator, but in the end, he’s just as much of a hopeless romantic as Gatsby. Nick Carraway’s narration is something that I’ve only recently started reflecting upon, after my umpteenth reading and having had his unreliability pointed out to me. I have a tendency to rely heavily on narrators, taking their word as truth, and it’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve really realised that there are at least two sides to every story. I think of poor Daisy, and the fact that she loved both Gatsby and Tom, and wonder if there’s ever a situation in which there is only one truth.

The thing that gets be about Gatsby is the feel of it. The rush of energy, of excitement. A lot of people have said to me that they don’t like Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, that they’re not sure of it, that it’s too over the top or the music’s too modern or it’s just not quite right. I love Lurhmann’s adaptation, because it makes me feel the same way. The same sense of hope, of excess, of new beginnings and past loves and quiet despair, can be found when I watch the movie as when I read the pages of my most-thumbed novel.

I’ve written about The Great Gatsby at length over at Luscious. Do check it out, and bask in the luxury while you’re there.

Paris in the summertime

Paula Maclaine’s The Paris Wife is a fictional memoir of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson. Truth be told, I didn’t so much read it as inhale it. I mean, 1920s Paris? Take me there, please.

The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson’s romance, from their chance meeting at a friend’s house in Chicago through their whirlwind lettered romance and wedding to their five years living in Paris as man – no, artist – and wife. I was sucked in by MacLaine’s description of brass bands and hot Paris nights and loose 1920s fashions and cobblestones and Hemingway’s marriage to his craft. There was nothing overdone or tryhard about the prose; it was simple, elegant, exactly what it was trying to be: a modern interpretation of a 1920s voice.

The Paris Wife is told in the first person, which I’m not usually into, but Hadley Richardson was such a joy to be with that it was hardly 10 pages before I was completely sucked in. She wasn’t whiny or arrogant, as many first-person protagonists are wont to be. She was deeply in love, ready to sacrifice anything for Ernest and his work, but at the same time quietly resentful of  the time she spent alone. I ached when the marriage started falling apart, and raged on her behalf at the audacity of Ernest’s mistress and Hadley’s best friend. Hadley’s was a voice that I responded to.

I got a little thrill each time I came across a name I recognised – Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Max Perkins, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They were all friends, all part of the same social circle. They read each other’s work and encouraged each other and drank ridiculous amounts of alcohol together. There was a fantastic scene where Hadley and Ernest met F Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest admits he’s never read any of Scott’s work, and Scott says that he’s just released a new book, The Great Gatsby (the fangirl in me shrieked a bit, I’ll admit). They chat a bit and then Scott moves on to talk to someone else, and Hadley wonders if she’ll ever get the courage to tell him that she’s read The Beautiful and Damned. It’s just perfect, the mixture of shyness and openness. I think Hadley might become one of my favourite protagonists, or at least one of my favourite summer reads.

And really, how great is that cover? Hadley in a fabulous magenta dress and dark fur coat, espresso at her elbow, scribbling furiously in a little Moleskine notebook. Journalling or dreaming or creating. The kind of cover that sucks you right in.