The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
While it might be an interesting window in the world of the rich and careless of the Jazz age, The Great Gatsby suffers from not having a single sympathetic character. The whole cast is made of wimps, frauds, cheaters, liars and mostly people who don’t know how to fill an afternoon, and yet not a single one of them has a motivation for anything they do in the book, except maybe for Gatsby himself, a victim to young love and, possibly, PTSD, who appears too little and too fast, mostly filtered by the tedious and boring eye of the main character and narrator.
At the end of it all the status quo is preserved, we are no wiser to what makes the characters’ heart’s tick (apart from the ubiquitous mint juleps) and a whole lot of good prose has got squandered on thin air.
Oh, and the baby. The baby that is mentioned twice. WHAT BABY.