Reader's file: the fascist archives - Italian publisher's reader's reports on foreign books from fascist period

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Minna Proctor

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD The Great Gatsby (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1925)

3 January 1936

This novel (which is perfect for the Palma imprint) is set during the period of American prohibition, when a number of unscrupulous and irresolute individuals grew rich off contraband alcohol. The bootlegger pirate of the modern age is seen here in a whole variety of ways--an extended social theory that starts with the guy who risks his hide to bring alcohol into the United States and ends with the big mogul who lives off him like a millionaire.

Gatsby belongs to the latter group, but he's only involved in the illegal acquisition of riches in order to win back the heart of the woman he left when he went off to the army to the French front.

Gatsby is a mysterious figure, at once captivating and a little unsettling. He's a kind of gentleman, who throws big parties flaunting his wealth--sumptuous and spectacular--in the hope of drawing his former love back. He wants to retrieve the idyll lost to the war.

These adventures of a sentimental bootlegger take place against the backdrop of post-war America, an atmosphere of reckless dissoluteness that should have evaporated in the wake of the great financial crisis of a few years earlier. Gatsby's undaunted and unreasonable sentimentalism is a marked contrast to the bitter, vicious character of typical American life.

Daisy, who Gatsby loves, got tired of waiting for her lover to come back from Europe, so she married the millionaire Tom Buchanan--a crude and hypocritical libertine--who adopts the moral codes of regular people, leading regular lives, and makes weapons out of them. Buchanan's lover is married to a service-station owner. She ends up dead under the wheels of Gatsby's flashy automobile which Daisy herself is in that moment driving.

When Tom figures out that Daisy and Gatsby have rekindled their old flame, and that the very woman he had betrayed is now swept up in a sentimental fantasy from the past, he forgets his own infidelity and the destruction he is thus responsible for. He crushes his rival in a magnificent scene in which Gatsby is being tracked down for smuggling by special investigators and Tom manages to twist the situation in his favor by turning his dead lover's vengeful husband against Gatsby at the same moment. Even Daisy suddenly renounces her dreams of true love--entertained without conviction for a fleeting moment. Gatsby is killed by the service station owner, who lost his mind after learning about both his wife's death and her betrayal in one fell swoop.

The story is told through a series of tableaus, each one with its own brilliantly depicted atmosphere--you might even say that each scene has its own color which remains indelibly impressed on the reader's imagination. Hundreds of strange characters, each one defying classification--and sometimes tending toward caricature--mill around the protagonists. The whole idle and splendid world of the so-called "good society" of Long Island and New York. All of it dominated by alcohol and the pursuit of pleasure that runs through these pages. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the best contemporary American novelists. Other than this novel, he's written This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, as well as other books. He has spent a great deal of time living in Europe, especially in Italy.