Posted on 04/26/2013 1:58:11 PM PDT by Borges
“The Great Gatsby” has united generations of American readers with its crash-and-burn tale of empty elegance and impossible love on Long Island in the 1920s.
Now the novel is dividing the nation’s booksellers with dueling paperback editions: the enigmatic blue cover of the original and the movie tie-in book that went on sale Tuesday, a brash, flashy version with Leonardo DiCaprio front and center.
The new edition is timed with the 3-D film adaptation, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Mr. DiCaprio, that will arrive in theaters on May 10.
So far this year, sales of the paperback with the original jacket art — a glowing cityscape and a pair of floating eyes — have been extraordinary. On Thursday, it was the top-selling book on Amazon.com. At Barnes & Noble stores last week, no other paperback book sold more copies. It has landed on best-seller lists for independent bookstores.
***
“It’s just God-awful,” Kevin Cassem, a bookseller at McNally Jackson, said on Tuesday. “ ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with. We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Dickens scholars don’t pay any attention to her. That novel is nowhere near the most read Dickens novel in 2013.
An opinion has to be informed and substantiated and come from a set of First Principles. Not “It was boring and it sucked.”
I don't think so either. According to Borges' definition a piece of art that brings calm to the soul would be termed "disturbing".
I think there's a better word.
It appears to me that the majority of the posts are in essence saying "it was boring and sucked".
Oh, so you meant only scholars' opinions were important when you said noble characters were uninteresting.
An Academician!
Standards only serve to perpetuate the dominant ethos and silence the oppressed.
Destroy the Canon! Democratize self-expression!
Tender Is the Night is a novel for adults; entirely apart from the sexual elements, youngsters lack the life experience of failure and disappointment to read it with profit. But Gatsby is a great and important novel. The catalogue of guests alone makes it memorable; the yearning and unbridgeable social gaps make it a true tragedy that’s relevant to every American. And it’s really, really well written.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is embarrassing slop.
Yes, you will. It’ll be worth your while.
?
It’s not that I think it’s *displacing* another work. I don’t really look at books as necessarily “period pieces”. I didn’t like The Great Gatsby because I didn’t see the point of it. There was no redeeming “brightness”. Anywhere. It was just one ugly mess after another. The characters- had no character. But then, I really don’t enjoy tragic, hopeless stories.
It *was* depressing. Pretentious, sordid, & maudlin. I don’t understand why anyone would tell a story like that. Or even more, why anyone would want to read it- let alone others keep re-telling it.
I like Edith Wharton better & Hemingway even less than Fitzgerald. It’s just a matter of personal taste.
I think so. I also think that by definition of its being classic it transcends eras. This notion is verified when I see 12 year old girls getting involved in it the themes etc.
Something will come after the progressive era it will fail We may as well get the kids thinking that wealthy people are not bad, it’s the LOVE of money that’s bad. Have met a lot of bad poor jealous people and a lot of benevolent wealthy people.
For something to bring ‘calm’ it first has to transfix.
Its’ brightness was in the lyrical prose. It’s a model that other writers (J.D. Salinger especially) have aspired to.
Art can’t do all those fine things you enumerated unless it penetrates our equilibrium, provokes reflection, and provides new insights. That’s what “disturb” means. It doesn’t mean that art has to annoy or upset. It does mean we have to escape the puritan notion that art is a mere entertainment, a gratuitous, decorative indulgence. Art is a spiritual way of truth telling. It lies at the heart of what it means to be a human creature, because the infinite and transcendent God (no mean artist himself) is the ground of all truth and almost entirely mystery whom we know mostly through his work and signs and thus come to know ourselves. Which is the entire purpose of art, isn’t it?
I don’t think that is what disturb means. I don’t think a person must be disturbed to be inspired.
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