Status Updates From Careless People: Murder, Ma...

"Murder happens casually and is forgotten."

"They were all clinging to the wreckage."

I didn't realise Scott & Zelda's last years were so desolate

The reviewers of The Great Gatsby "could only see Fitzgerald's shimmering reproduction of their world's surface, not the way he had also plunged past it, foretelling a nation that would be adulterated by success."

The murders of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills are "riven by questions about money and status and power, erupting into a brutality that is met with incompetence and corruption. It is a story of violence triumphant, of chaos and disappointment. The story of Hall and Mills tells not of America's romantic past, but of its invidious future."

As well as a book about the American dream, The Great Gatsby "is also a story about knowing your place. It is about the brutality of forcing people back into their places, the cruelty of being found out."

"The Great Gatsby is certainly not a true story, nor is it in any meaningful way based on a true story. It might better be regarded as an untrue story, one that took myriad facts and unmade them."

"Fitzgerald's story about possibility is capacious enough to grasp all three possibilities. The creative process pushes the murders of Hall and Mills into the background: the story has been set free to fly into fiction, transposed into a different key, but audible in echoes and harmonic shifts, transfigured from the wretched to the beautiful."

I love this idea

In the 1920s the holocaust's "primary meaning was a sacrificial offering."

"Both pairs of men are discussing parallel cases of unfaithful women. One unfaithful woman is a killer, the other is killed; the men sit amid the ashes and the dust to which they will all return."

The Great Gatsby is a "novel concerned with the tragic consequences of misplaced fidelity, about a man who is destroyed by the colossal vitality of the illusion that has sustained him."

Daisy "needs immediacy, for she dwells in the shallows of time, drifting unrestfully and without purpose from moment to moment."

"Memory is as unreliable as narration, and there was always a new story."

"Nemesis incubating" - Zelda Fitzgerald
"They thought Bacchus was presiding over the festivities, until Nemisis appeared - the retributive goddess whom the Romans aptly called Invidia. Nothing would surive but the stories, the tales of a quest for lasting pleasure, which left a trace of beauty: the disarray of falling stars didn't come to naught after all."

"Fitzgerald was so drunk the waiter refused to serve them. That seemed no reason for him not to drive home."

How did any of them survive to write the books??

"No ground under our feet." - Fitzgerald describing their time at Great Neck 1922-23

"The accidental is all that we are left with once we have lost our illusions."

"Someone was going to have to improve the story, to lie better than the truth."

"The problem with unreliable narrators is that sometimes they tell the truth - it's just difficult to know when."

"Sometimes this technique is described as fiction."

😂

"Gatsby has no friends - just uninvited guests."

"This begs a question about what defines normal people, or everyday life: unlike fiction, reality has no obligation to be realistic."

"Being imported wholesale into a work of fiction would give anyone a scare."

"Although Hamborszky's statement was hearsay, vague, and did not actually deal with the crime, and thus could not be put before the grand jury, 'the authorities did not consider this a fatal defect'"

Well that's ok then...