Posted on 05/07/2013 12:00:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
I'm not as familiar with fictional literature from earlier in the century, but unending streams of consciousness seemed to be considered de rigour mid century. Tedious reading.
different strokes.
Frankly, I think her criticisms nail it: No likable, or even fun-to-hate characters; preachy, yet emotionally aloof and amoral; envious of the people it hates.
Bing Bing Bing Bing Bing!
Allegedly he and his wife walked out half way through. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. I imagine it’s hard to see your work translated onto the big screen, even in the best of versions.
I remember this about TGG: Laz once spammed a troll’s thread with the entire first chapter of TGG. It remains, to this day, one of the longest single posts on FR.
This was before the Mods, and Jim had to zot the trolls by himself.
Bingo! I was always fond of the book. I suspect many detractors react against the popularity of the work and simply have to find something wrong with it to demonstrate how much smarter they are than the great unwashed who enjoyed it.
I found the Redford/Farrow film wearisome and horribly cast (with the exception of Sam Waterston as Carraway). The trailers for the DiCaprio film seem to be more promising. DiCaprio is IMHO, a much better casting choice than Redford for the part (and I'm generally not much of a DiCaprio fan). One of my big disappointments with the Redford film is that it largely ignored the real backstory (Dan Cody, WWI), while the DiCaprio trailers seem to actively reference both. DiCaprio tends to run hot or cold, but if he's on his game, this could rank with The Aviator. IMHO, Tobey McGuire is really the one with the big shoes to fill here as his Carraway will inevitably be compared to Waterston's, which has to qualify as one of Hollywood's best casting choices ever.
I tend to agree. The novels of the Romance Period would be better fare. Captain Blood, The Three Musketeers, Scaramouche, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo all have interesting plot lines and action to keep a boy and girl interested. Gatsby is too tough for that age. As for Catcher in the Rye, I have never been able to make myself like it. Even less Frannie and Zooey.
If you want to enjoy Shakespeare, and you came of age in the MTV era (or at least could enjoy Miami Vice), may I recommend Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet? (The same director is about to release The Great Gatsby, starring the same lead, Leonardo DiCaprio.)
Luhrman didn’t modernize the language, but he cleverly used visual clues to help people understand what the characters were talking about.
“Allegedly he and his wife walked out half way through. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. I imagine it’s hard to see your work translated onto the big screen, even in the best of versions.”
heheh.
My grandfather owned a speakeasy in NYC in those days, called the Daylighter. My great aunt and uncle were Vaudvillian performers, actually headliners.
When I was growing up I heard from my grandmother and aunt and uncle that LI was full of huge wild parties in fantastic mansions, some way out on the Island. It was all woods then.
I have to say that the only thing that novel sparks in me, though I wasn’t there, is nostalgia.
What an era.
I miss my grandmother, they don’t make em like those days anymore.
Roger that. While I like and respect Bruce Dern as an actor I thought he was totally miscast as Tom Buchanan and is nothing like the hulking brute depicted in the novel.
Two books show us that, one fiction and the other non-fiction: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Right Stuff.
Nobody talks like that in real life, but then again, no-one ever used to write like they talked. If you ever get the chance to read letters Civil War soldiers wrote home to their mothers, the poetry and formality is almost shocking to our modern ears, but can leave you wondering how is it that lowly farmboys turned warriors can write so much better than the most artful of modern writers. The key, though, is that they expressed so much better what they meant.
By the way, in many cultures, written and spoken languages are entirely different. For instance, Standard Arabic is written throughout the Islamic world, yet the local spoken languages vary greatly. And, of course, throughout medieval Western Europe, Latin remained the standard written language, while the local dialects drifted away into Iltalian, Portgueses, French, Romansch, Romanian, Spanish, and dozens of smaller languages which most people no longer even know about, like Languedoc, Catalan, and such.
It wasn’t that the Catholic Church was using some code language; it was that anyone who knew how to write wrote in Latin!
Oh, the Right Stuff... That was a great book of 20th century America. 19th century goes to the Red Badge of Courage.
Gatsby is one of the three most over rated books in American history. The others being Catcher In The Rye and anything by Ernest Hemingway.
Lol...I didn’t even know who Bruce Dern was the first time I saw that flick, but I remember thinking to myself how skinny his arms were....
“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered, “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
—Nick’s description of Daisy (and the Jazz age, if you will) from Chapter 1 of the novel.
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