Is Going Well
Saturday. I downloaded The Great Gatsby (and read it) on the Kindle today. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, written when he was 29, is considered one of the great 20th Century American novels, one of the defining novels, if not the defining novel, of the Jazz Age. Why I've not read it before I do not know. Perhaps its many reviews and mentions over the years combined with my own ill conceived imaginings set me off, but again, I do not know.
Still, in reading Murikami's book yesterday in which he referenced Gatsby as a singular influence in his own writing, I figured what the hell, I've got this Kindle thing, I've read my first book on it without appreciable damage, I'll download Gatsby. Which I did.
I wasn't sure what I'd think, how I'd react - again carrying all the Gatsby baggage I've carried over the years - but I have to admit I read it with great interest and admiration, opening my eyes to its probably deserved reputation through its lightness of touch and its honest handling of people's foibles with great delicacy of language. A musing on a man named Gatsby that was interpreted as a musing on an entire age, a musing on the conceits of its time and place that made it a musing and definition of its period in history.
So it obviously snuck up on me from the first page, erasing any and all of my accumulated prejudices. I checked my living room bookshelves and discovered I have three other books by Fitzgerald, none of them to my recollection having the effect reading Gatsby had on me today. I read these others some four decades ago, probably in or just after college. I wish I'd had the smarts then to read Gatsby instead. I recommend it to anyone who's wrestled with writing.
A get together later this afternoon in El Cerrito to celebrate Ms. A's birthday. I picked up a couple of bottles of Veuve Cliquot (the widow Cliquot) this morning and put them in the refrigerator to cool. The day is going well.
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