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__**Rating:**__ 4 3/4 stars


 * __Summary:__** //The Great Gatsby// is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald describing a love affair of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, told through the eyes of his friend Nick Carraway. Jay Gatsby is a multi-millionaire famous (or perhaps infamous) in the Roaring Twenties New York/Long Island area for throwing excessive, glamorous parties every weekend. His next-door-neighbor, Nick, moves in and befriends Jay. Jay reveals to him that he has been madly in love with Daisy Buchanan for many years. The rest of the story tells the tragic, yet boundlessly amusing, tale of a long "lost" love gone horribly wrong in the middle of New York's "Jazz Age".


 * __Review:__ ** //Gatsby //  is widely considered to be  //the //  American novel. As impossible as it seems to be to pinpoint one particular novel that best portrays the American culture, I would say this declaration is not far off. Fitzgerald employs very specific references and alliterations to places, streets, and people in the '20s New York City scene. The descriptions of the seemingly endless parties somehow maintains a realistic feeling. One second Fitzgerald may be describing the world's most famous jazz singer bursting into song in the middle of Gatsby's house, and then the next he is describing the more ordinary individuals entertaining themselves with the the great (admittedly American) tradition of gossiping to their hearts' content. The best feature of this novel is the fact that the author very clearly had his finger right on the pulse of the bubbling, and occasionally boiling, culture of New York City in this time. I would have to say that the biggest weakness, to me, was the fact that, as timeless as the novel is, sometimes the dialect used is difficult to understand. Every now and then the descriptive language is bordering on impossible to understand. This is, without exaggeration, one of, if not, the, most important and best written novel in American history and I would recommend it to anyone of any walk of life.