/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3732460]

Hey there /lit/

I want to read the great gatsby. I'm not a native speaker but I prefer buying books in their original language whenever i can, so i just want to ask you guys if it's considered hard to read. For comparison reading lovecraft in english is a little hard but manageable for me.

Thanks.

[Anonymous No.3732478]

students in north america are assigned this when they are about sixteen years old or maybe younger, so it is not super challenging. The language is probably a bit more modern than Lovecraft.

[Anonymous No.3732481]

>>3732478
thanks, sounds like something i could manage

[Anonymous No.3732483]

>>3732460
It isn't hard to read.
The language isn't bare-ass like that of Hemingway or Bukowski, but it isn't fucking crazy ornamental text like fucking Blake or some shit.
You will be fine.
Enjoy it.

[Anonymous No.3732488]

>>3732483
thanks bro

[Anonymous No.3732527]

>here's the start of Chapter 1, to give you an idea of what you can expect

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

[Anonymous No.3732529]

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

[sage No.3732579]

>>3732527
thank you

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3732595]

Here, it'll take you ten minutes to find out yourself.

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter1.html