The Great Gatsby

 

      F.Scott Fitzgerald

Yesterday’s rant brought to mind the subject of wealth, luxury and the riches that some 

people amass.So what better way than to feature this fabulous book!

It’s one of my favourite books and it’s The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What a glamorous and glitzy novel! Not only does it highlight The American Dream and cover so many themes, including human aspiration, it also oozes the best language devices in such a ‘delicious’ way...so much so that I use various extracts with my students. I have a favourite part that I read again and again, just to savour the flavour! It’s mouth watering, to say the least.I thank F. Scott Fitzgerald every time I bring this out to read! Superb! 

Here it is: 

‘There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue 

gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon, I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aqua planes over the cataracts of foam.On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

At least once a fortnight, a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvres, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.’

Great writing...a fantastic book which, yes, transports the reader to the jazz age but also promotes so much more than that! A must read and I think it’s a book that needs reading again and again in order to really ‘get’ what F. Scott Fitzgerald was really trying to say. 

 Meanwhile, anyone for some ‘glistening hors-d'oeuvres’? 😁