Yesterday, along with the merengue music, I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about last week's passsages from The Great Gatsby. But I couldn't organize commentary - I didn't know what to say about it except that it's terrific.
I like how descriptions of environment seem to tie in, to harmonize, with the narrative.
In some books, descriptions of surroundings and weather, etc., kind of get in the way of finding out what happens, and the reader may find himself skipping them.
---------------------- [excerpt] ----------------- After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer flowers - but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.
"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. -------------------- [end / excerpt]
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Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote:
-------------- Many writers have been distinguished by a sense of the past; Fitzgerald possessed a complex and delicate sense of the passing present. Malcolm Cowley has observed that Fitzgerald wrote as if surrounded by clocks and calendars.
Fitzgerald's primary concern was with the rhythms, the colors, the tones associated with time and place - often expressed through synesthesia, as in "yellow cocktail music" (p. 49). Time and place are inseparable in Fitzgerald: not just how it was, but how it felt in "a transitory enchanted moment" (p. 217).
He later wrote, "After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains." His task was to fix and preserve evanescent experience. Fitzgerald's sense of mood was extraordinary....
Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2013 film version
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