Finished reading Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

By LilyLovesBooks64

I kept hearing about this book, so I grabbed it from the Book Fair in Kolkata. Since it’s pretty short, I figured I’d finish it in like 2–3 days. Nope. Very quickly I realized it’s not one of those page-turners that just flies by. Also, I haven’t really read anything that dense after school, where we only did English Literature as a subject. So this felt like the first time I’m reading a “proper” book that’s basically taught. That said, I genuinely loved the story. Romance novels usually aren’t my thing, but this one isn’t that—it’s more about the emptiness behind “upper class” people. I also really liked the twist at the end. It left me with this hollow feeling, like the book is almost making you feel empty on purpose. My only real struggle was the English. I’m a non-native speaker, and honestly it was REALLY hard. There’s so much symbolism that nothing is really said directly. Like it doesn’t just go “he got shot and died” or whatever—you get lines like the sun looking ugly to him, kissing his body, roses and figures and leaves and all that. For me, that style just piled up. I ended up marking pretty much every single word/phrase I couldn’t get, and it’s a lot. I feel like it’ll take me a month to properly decode the vocabulary and the symbolism. I’m not going to lie—I don’t usually enjoy that level of abstraction. To me, if I need a dictionary and sit with something for 10 minutes every few lines, it starts feeling more like philosophy or extra writing. But (and here’s the weird part) I was wrong about that. The more I think about it, the poetic/flow style isn’t just symbolic or “abstract for no reason”—it’s an art thing. I forgot it’s a classic and I was comparing it to some younger Indian YA novels. Because of the language barrier, I assumed it was kind of pretentious, but no—it’s meant to be read and appreciated differently. Also, I heard it didn’t do great when the author was alive, and then it became popular during WW2 when it was handed out for free to soldiers in America. I can totally see why it wasn’t popular. Still, I’m taking it as an English lesson, and I hope writing down what I don’t understand actually makes me better.