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Narrated by Brent Bradley
F. Scott FitzgeraldUnabridged — 5 hours, 49 minutes
Narrated by Brent Bradley
F. Scott FitzgeraldUnabridged — 5 hours, 49 minutes
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Considered by many to be the greatest novel of all time. Set against the bopping back drop of the Jazz Age, the story of Jay Gatsby and his lover Daisy is truly timeless. Just as relevant now as when it was written, it's the story of class divides, moral depravity and the death of the American Dream.
. . . It expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness. . . . A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well -- he always has -- for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, April 1925
Readers in that sizeable group of people who think The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel will be delighted with Robbins's subtle, brainy and immensely touching new reading. There have been audio versions of Gatsby before this-by Alexander Scourby and Christopher Reeve, to name two-but actor/director Robbins brings a fresh and bracing vision that makes the story gleam. From the jaunty irony of the title page quote ("Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!") to the poetry of Fitzgerald's ending about "the dark fields of the republic" and "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," Robbins conjures up a sublime portrait of a lost world. And as a bonus, the excellent audio actor Robert Sean Leonard reads a selection of Fitzgerald's letters to editors, agents and friends which focus on the writing and selling of the novel. Listeners will revel in learning random factoids, e.g., in 1924, Scott and Zelda were living in a Rome hotel that cost just over $500 a month, and he was respectfully suggesting that his agent Harold Ober ask $15,000 from Liberty magazine for the serial rights to Gatsby. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Gr 8 UpAn initial biographical essay and closing chronology introduce Fitzgerald, his era, and his place in American literature. "For Further Research" includes Web site sources and provides helpful primary and secondary references. Spanning more than 50 years of criticism, the 19 pithy essays, one by Fitzgerald himself, are divided into three chapters that successively focus on Gatsby's character, American culture, and literary structure. Additional quotes, boxed and placed throughout the text, provide additional support for the authors' positions. There is little overlap of other Fitzgerald or Gatsby volumes in similar series, and although comparable titles written by one author exist, this volume's multi-authored critiques afford a highly varied, even conflicting, dialogue that's necessary for stimulating classroom discussion.Kate Foldy, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
"More than an American classic; it’s become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the American dream."
"A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel."
"The Great Gatsby is still as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time."
"It has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for years."
"I’m a sucker for efficiency. This book gets so much out of what is, ultimately, a rather slim story. I adore it."
It seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” - TS Eliot
“He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation.” - The New York Times
Nearly a century later, we’re still reading The Great Gatsby.”
Leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder, in which fact after fact, implication after implication is pondered over, weighed, and measured. And when all are linked together, the weight of the story as a revelation of life and as a work of art becomes apparent.”
In astonishingly beautiful, layered prose, what Scott Fitzgerald manages to do is to replicate some of the mystery of what it is to be human…One of those rare books that you can read at different times in your life, and each time it’ll do something different to you.”
It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos, and loveliness…A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.”
The finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.”
Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking.”
A stunning illumination of the world, not only a miracle of talent but a triumph of technique.”
Fitzgerald’s novel is a portal to the savage heart of the human spirit, affords a glimpse at our humanity and wonders at our enormous capacity to dream, to imagine, to hope and to persevere.”
[Fitzgerald] had one of the rarest qualities in all literature—charm. It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets.”
[Gatsby’s] exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failure.”
[Gatsby’s] exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failure.”
[Gatsby] is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life.
"This edition of The Great Gatsby confirms what Fitzgerald Society members have long believed: Michael Nowlin is a leader in the emerging generation of Fitzgerald scholars. His introduction here charts the intensely personal journey through love, loss, and ambition that Fitzgerald traveled in order to realize his masterpiece; Nowlin's appendices, meanwhile, provide secondary sources for appreciating the chaotic energies of youth, race, and cultural change compelling the novel's inexorable tragedy. Whether excerpting Fitzgerald's mid-1920s correspondence, contemporary reviews, or nonfiction gems of the day—including Zelda Fitzgerald's insightful 'What Became of the Flappers?' (1925)—Nowlin dramatizes how thoroughly Jay Gatsby's creator intuited the sadness and uncertainty beneath the glitz and gild of modernity's most golden of decades."
"Canadian readers are indeed fortunate to have Michael Nowlin's extremely useful edition of The Great Gatsby. Nowlin provides a wealth of ancillary materials that enhance our understanding and appreciation of Fitzgerald's masterpiece: a selection of Fitzgerald's correspondence about Gatsby; eight advertisements that graphically demonstrate the commodity culture underlying the novel; and, perhaps most worthwhile of all, a selection of contemporary essays that supply an invaluable contextual framework for Gatsby. Throughout, Nowlin's emphasis is on the quality, not quantity of these materials; the result is a book that will be indispensable to students, teachers, and the casual reader alike."
★ 09/01/2013
Fitzgerald's classic novel depicts the times, sounds, attitudes, and lives of many Americans in the 1920s. Upon moving to the West Egg area of Long Island to sell bonds in New York, unassuming narrator Nick Carraway becomes involved with, though never quite a part of, several segments of the alternating languid and furiously paced lives of individuals with money and time to spend. When he meets his neighbor the mysterious Jay Gatsby at a wild party in the neighborhood, Nick becomes entwined in Gatsby's hopeful plan to rekindle his continuing love for Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan. Themes of reality vs. fantasy, hope vs. obsession, the idle rich, and the American dream are beautifully threaded to offer readers a tapestry that has come to embody the time period. Narrator Jake Gyllanhaal gives an understated performance filled with nuance and a thoughtful appreciation of the written word. Never overpowering, Gyllanhaal allows time for readers to draw their own conclusions and investigate their own interpretations of the novel's many facets. This fresh audio production will inspire readers to experience the classic anew. VERDICT This is an essential purchase for libraries not owning this novel in audiobook format and for those wanting to use the popular movie poster found on the audiobook cover as a conduit for enticing new listeners.—Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX
This interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece by narrator Sean Astin adds new layers of pathos and empathy to the classic story. As portrayed by Astin, young Nick Carraway reveals his entanglement with the mysterious and eclectic millionaire Jay Gatsby in a youthful timbre and naïve tone. Astin also adds new insight into the tragic love story between Daisy Buchanan and Gatsby, and he shines while describing the Roaring 20s’ decadent parties and Gatsby's unrequited love and inevitable end. Astin's interpretation gives Gatsby's loss new emotions. Nailing the iconic ending, Astin channels Nick's longing to comprehend what has happened to him. R.O. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940160260600 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ¿¿¿¿¿ |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon - for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him - with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe - so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said "Why - ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
"How do you get to West Egg Village?" he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees - just as things grow in fast movies - I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college - one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News" - and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded" man. This isn't just an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals - like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed fiat at the contact end - but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly over-head. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the - well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard - it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires - all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white places of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy - even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach - but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it - I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body - he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage - a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked - and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.
"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling - and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it - indeed I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise - she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression - then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again - the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Copyright © 1925 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Excerpted by permission.
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