Book Review: What I thought of Gatsby

First I have to explain I am talking about the book The Great Gatsby, not the recent movie.  I’ve read the book now three times; I still feel unsettled about it.  This time around, I checked the book out of the local library, along with an audio version; when the CD occasionally refused to play correctly, I could listen to the recording.
 

I had notice before that Gatsby is a short book; I don’t know how many words, but it prints under two hundred pages—is it even a “novel” at all?  This time, I also noticed that it only contains nine chapters.  I didn’t count the scenes, but there aren’t many.  This gives it a compact, structured quality.  We know from books like The Last Tycoon that Fitzgerald carefully considered questions of “point-of-view” and issues of whether to present stories sequentially or via flashbacks.  Both approaches are used in Gatsby.

“First” (actually third) impressions:  I’m still a bit foggy about Gatsby’s past, and I get the impression that other readers are as well.  People say he was a bootlegger; my impression is that he just got in well with gangsters and made a lot of money by “being of service.”  At the end of the book it seems one of Gatsby’s associates has been arrested in some kind of sting operation.

Besides what I call “The Fog of Gatsby,” other points about this book frustrate me.  Could Gatsby really make so much money in so short a time, so mysteriously?  Well—maybe.

More importantly, I’ve never understood the pivotal events of the plot.  Gatsby and Tom trade cars for obscure reasons.  Daisy drives Gatsby’s car at the climax of the book.  Why?

Are these characters believable?  Generally, they aren’t believable for me.

Then there’s the question of why I should care about these characters—I don’t, really; it’s not really clear why the narrator does.  Gatsby wants be rich so he can dazzle Daisy and win her back from Tom.  Daisy has a voice and way of speaking that captivates men somehow—but does she have any substance?  When Gatsby shows her the shirts in his wardrobe, she buries her face in them and exclaims “How lovely!”

Nick, the narrator, doesn’t seem a bad fellow; but he makes all sorts of dubious declarations.  He says that Gatsby represents everything for which he has an unaffected scorn—but suggests Gatsby is gorgeous—a “series of successful gestures?”  He says “Gatsby turned out all right at the end”—certainly debatable points!

Perhaps like Fitzgerald’s writing; it dazzles with adjectives and adverbs and beauty.  But—I often found myself thinking:  Ah that is beautiful—beautiful!  But…what is he saying?  What does he mean?  “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  I always enjoy reading this book—I’ve read it now three times, after all.  But I always end up thinking:  What??

Film Review: "Rosenstrasse"

I first heard of the film Rosenstrasse several years back.    I don’t think it was as far back as 2003, when the film was originally released.  At any rate I heard an interview about it on Fresh Air on NPR.  I got the impression that the film dealt with a woman who helped Jews escape from Nazi Germany. I thought it was a true story.  It took me this long to actually watch the film.

I was right and wrong about the material.  It is about a woman who saved a little girl from the Nazis—one girl, not many people.  The film is based on a true incident; but the incident did not involve a gentile woman who hid Jews from the Nazis; it involved one of the few known acts of resistance to the Nazi—and it was public resistance, by non-Jewish Germans.

Yet it was an isolated incident.  Early in 1943, just after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels called for “Total War” against the Allies.  There were still thousands of Jews living in Berlin.  Many were rounded up and detained in a former Jewish Community Center in downtown Berlin—less than a mile, I would guess, from what became Hitler’s Reichsbunker.  Many of the men were married to non-Jews.  These women gathered across the street from the detention center and kept vigil for their husbands.  They refused to disband, even when threatened by the police and by soldiers with machine guns.  After a week, the detainees were released from the threat of deportation—which would have sent them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

This much is historically true.  I think the actual characters in the film were fictional, however.

As a film, I found it confusing.  I sometimes lost track of the various characters.  The film follows several sets of people impacted by the detentions.  It starts in the present with an older Jewish woman in New York whose husband dies.  During the mourning, the woman seems to “go Jewish,” causing her daughter to go to Berlin to try to find the woman who saved her during the Nazi years.  The film hops between different time periods and characters—rather hard to follow.  It was also difficult, sometimes, to believe some of the situations.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film and found it interesting.  I’d recommend it—especially for anyone interested in that historical period.

Conflicting Holiday Art

Because of the art I exposed myself to over the holidays, I now find myself feeling conflicted.  And yet I had a very enjoyable holiday, including two weeks off from work.

 

What were these conflicting influences I subjected myself to?

First, I was finishing up listening to “Bebop Spoken Here,” a four-CD collection.  From there, I went on to “Doo Wop Box 2,” another four-CD set.  Meanwhile, I listened to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, and participated in a “you-sing-it” Handel’s Messiah.

Meanwhile, I was reading The Bell Jar and looking through two biographies of Sylvia Plath; and continuing my study of the “Beat” writers—specifically, I saw the new film “Kill Your Darlings,” about the killing of David Kammerer in 1943.

I suppose it was the Doo Wop and the biographies that made me realize how conflicted I was feeling.

After all, the Bach and the Handel and the Tchaikovsky— that music is such a standard background for the holidays.  It forms the standard background noise of the season—along with the Christmas carols we start hearing in November or even October now.  And I’ve been immersed in the Beat material for years—even “Kill Your Darlings” barely raised an alarm with me.  After all, I’ve played through the audio recording of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (same basic story) several times now.

And I’d read The Bell Jar before, long ago; I knew the basic story.

But I didn’t know very much about Sylvia Plath herself, other than how she ended her life.

To read about her, with the background noise of the Beats—contrasting drastically with the syrupy doo wop—now that was a set of conflicting emotions!

Film Review: Cole Porter’s Can-Can

I remember seeing this film when I was perhaps eleven years old; I saw it with my mother.  And since bought the soundtrack album, I soon memorized the songs.  That would be about fifty years ago!

I hadn’t seen the film since then.  I found a few clips on YouTube, but the reviewers were not kind and I figured it had never been put on DVD; then I found it on Netflix.

It was enjoyable and entertaining.  I did have quibbles with the characterizations; Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra both seem to fall into obvious traps in the course of the story; but the sets are beautiful, the dancing is great (Hermes Pan was the choreographer), and I love being immersed again in the Belle Époque 1890s of Paris/Montmartre.  Toulouse-Lautrec walks past in the opening sequence, and midway through the film Shirley MacLaine rips in half a sketch he has left on his café table when he doesn’t have the money to pay his bill.

Consider that the book for this musical was a plea against censorship, written during the McCarthy era.  The film appeared in 1960.  Nikita Khrushchev was allegedly offended after watching the can-can on set.

Many people complained that they couldn’t imagine Frank Sinatra playing a Frenchman; I wonder if they could imagine him as an Italian!  He’s paired with two definite Frenchmen:  Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan.  Curiously, no one seemed to complain that they couldn’t imagine Shirley MacLaine playing a French woman!

I did enjoy this film.  I notice that when people were sworn in the trial scenes, they did not say “So help me, God.”  I noticed the various ways that Sinatra pronounced his French.

It might surprise people to learn that censorship actually was an issue in 1890’s Paris.  Many groups worked for the “suppression of Vice.”  Maybe it wasn’t so different in the United States of the mid-twentieth century.

This being a Cole Porter musical, however, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the censors are won over by the art.

Review: “You Again”

A week or two back I watched “You Again,” a 2010 film my daughter liked but my wife didn’t much care for.  It had quite a cast:  Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Betty White…  My daughter is a fan of Kristen Bell and wanted me to see her in a movie (I’ve seen a few clips of her online)

 

I thought it was interesting, actually—a little long, but interesting; mostly, I suppose, for sociological reasons.

The premise is that Marni (Kristen Bell) was a total picked-upon in high school.  Now, eight years later, her brother Will (James Wolk) becomes engaged to Joanna (Odette Yustman)—the girl who tormented her.  When they get together for the wedding rehearsal, Joanna doesn’t recognize Marni.  Nevertheless, Marni decides to sabotage the engagement.

Turns out that Joanna’s aunt Ramona (Sigourney Weaver) always felt one-upped by Marni’s mother Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis).

Gail never realized that Ramona felt one-upped—so she never felt the need to apologize (indeed, should she?)

Joanna, on the other hand, fully understood what a total heel she had been in high school; after graduating, she became involved in various humanitarian causes.  Nevertheless, when Marni demands an apology for the way she treated her in high school, Joanna replies very superficially.

Which is the first problem for me.  Joanna realized years earlier what a jerk she was, and changed her life; but now, faced with one of the results of her earlier bad behavior—the sister of the man she supposedly loves—she is flippant.  I didn’t quite accept this in the character.

I realized also that, because of my own personal history, I was never badly bullied in school.  It’s a challenge for me to believe these characters, either the bullied or the ones bullying.

But I still found this an enjoyable and (as I said) interesting film.