J.K.Ekra’s Reviews > The Great Gatsby > Status Update

"She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. "

I am completely enchanted at this brilliantly well-written book.

The truth was Jay Gatsby, of West Egg,Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God- a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that- and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old would be likely to invent,and to this conception he was faithful to the end

"He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced- or concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself........."

"--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 in the term they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. "

The best thing I have read this year.