THE GREAT GATSBY

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge 

what a man will store up 

in his ghostly heart."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Vintage.

The Great Gatsby. The great F. Scott Fitzgerald. While I've read Zelda Fitzgerald's Save me the Waltz (published in 1932), I recently realised that I've never read The Great Gatsby which was published some seven years earlier! And while I enjoyed Zelda's account of the Roaring Twenties, it did not cross my mind to actually read her husband's work as well.

The language F. Scott Fitzgerald uses, astonishes me immensly. Not only could I underline most of the sentences on one page for further indulgence, I felt like I was there. Right there with the observer Nick Carraway as he unveils a past that comes haunting the lives of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, I stood next to the road where a fatal car accident took place and wept at the grave by the end of the book. The ending, I think, is a true ending. I might lack the adequate words but its tragedy is worthy of the story, of the participants toying with love, and life.

Now, this is where my passion for cinema kicks in: Baz Luhrmann, director of films like Romeo+Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge (2001) or Australia (2008) adapted the book for the big screen. Next year, his version of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age drama will have Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Jay Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. I suppose I'm not the only one who likes to watch Mulligan on screen - her performances in An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009), Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010) and Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) were mesmerising. I'm not so sure about Tobey Maguire playing Nick Carraway, but that might count as a subjective aversion against the man whose Spider Man performance was so easily outshone by Andrew Garfield.

In any case: I can't wait for the film!

Watch the trailer here.

And listen to the very cool sound of Jack White's Love is Blindness: