The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Perhaps for the first time after reading A Tale of Two Cities , I laid my hands on a novel which matches its intense romance and tragedy. The Great Gatsby is a book which defines the deterioration in human society and moral values with extreme precision and also shows the difference between romance and reality. It is a novel about characters, who are as real and just as easy to relate with as you are, who are vain, selfish and even pathetic at times. According to the blurb, 'it brilliantly captures the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status', which, it undoubtedly does.

Jay Gatsby, an under-the-hood rogue, is a character quite close to Rick of Casablanca and vaguely similar to Dickens' Sydney Carton. You don't appreciate him much at first but you learn to love him and gradually, sympathise with him. In this one phenomenal character that you love to hate and hate to love, an essential trait of humans comes out: our love of clinging to our dreams, imagination and the past, something, I am sure, everyone can relate to.

Written in the combined fashion of Salinger's vague philosophical tone and Truman Capote's frivolous lucidity, (though originally much before either of them learned writing) The Great Gatsby is perhaps the best American classic which keeps the reader engrossed throughout and the feeling that only a few things can evoke in you, like, the character of Heatchliff from Wuthering Heights and poems like The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes-the love for an anti-hero!

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