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F.Scott Fitzgerald - "THE GREAT GATSBY"
Can you relive the past? Can you revive a love that is no longer there?
Jay Gatsby thinks so, and no one in the world can make him forget Daisy, that young woman from a good family who left him, because he was poor, to marry the wealthy Tom Buchanan.
Gatsby, who is now incredibly rich, surrounded by rumors about his ostentatious and sudden economic rise — some even suggesting he killed a man — has only one goal: to return to Daisy, to show her what an important person he has become and to leap back into the past, reset the clock’s hands to the right point and forget everything; West Egg, the nightly parties, the illegal betting, the insincere friendships, forget everything and live in a sort of limbo of love with Daisy.
Will he succeed? After all, Jay has great cards, his charm is acknowledged by everyone in West Egg, he is a person with an aura of mystery that fuels the gossip about him; described by his friend Nick Carraway, who in the novel is our narrator, as a person of continuously successful gestures... but Tom, his rival, does not think like Nick and is certainly not willing to step aside.
Nick Carraway tells us the whole story, and as he warns right at the start of the tale, he is not accustomed to judging and taking a moral stance, leaving us readers to form an opinion on the laws that govern that fragile world of the American wealthy bourgeoisie of the 1920s, that American dream that can so easily be shattered.
Fitzgerald transports us to a nighttime world of characters who drink champagne and drive sports cars at full speed, people who live in an eternal present of superficial well-being and who care about nothing but themselves and he does so with a writing style so imaginative and original that we feel a natural admiration for everything that revolves around Gatsby... and when the story seems to be heading toward an obvious conclusion, it surprises us with a series of memorable tragedies and revenges.
If there’s one thing that strikes me about Fitzgerald’s writing, which is at its peak here, it’s this kind of ambiguity; he shows us the questionable behavior of his characters, their blatant wealth, their total absence of morality, precisely outlining the limits of the society of which he himself is a part and at the same time he cannot help but love what he narrates... I don’t know about many of you, but for me, it reminds me of Federico Fellini from La Dolce Vita, who in his masterpiece shows us a post-imperial Rome in total moral decay which he is still in love with, he might criticize it, despise it but is always in love with it.
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