I can tell that The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fritzgerald may contain quite a bit of depth buried somewhere among its dense paragraphs but I may have missed most of these intricate details due to my hurry to start my shelf of sci-fi books as well as the chaos and fatigue of the Aalto orientation week. Partially due to this headspace I felt that the writing often just got in the way of the story and to be fair to me, three pages of pretty much just non-familiar fictional names is generally not too engaging or immersive for any book. Much is communicated through indirect metaphors, consequently requiring significantly more brain power than I had to expend while reading and therefore I had to sometimes go back multiple pages due to having missed or misunderstood entire story beats. That being said, “the demoniac Finn” in reference to the protagonist’s Finnish woman, whether that means girlfriend, wife, maid or some other flavor of servant - which also still remains unclear to me - is one of my favorite expressions in the book.

I can see the criticism of excess, lavish but ultimately empty and purposeless lifestyles and superficial fixations but its supposed genius did not quite open up to me. Perhaps that was due to my high expectations or impatience with the indirect, metaphorical and often confusing narration but I have seen, heard and read plenty of better stories on the topic. Granted, this might be the grandfather of many of them but to me the actual story seemed quite incoherent and arbitrary and I was not invested in any of the characters, of which there were so many that I could not keep track of all of them and their cryptically described, unclear relationships - let alone decipher their actual significances to the story. I would probably have to reread it with more thought but I think I will not feel too inspired to do so anytime soon.

I would recommend The Great Gatsby to friends and fans of American classics and those who enjoy novels full of highly poetic but quite cryptic language probably mainly for just literary analysis purposes but that is the extent to which my recommendation extends. For everyone else, do not confuse its shorter length with a fast read as if you attempt that, like I did, your impressions will likely be quite similar. To appreciate this, one must likely dedicate significantly more time for thought and real-time analysis than I could afford as this point. Maybe I will return to it some day, maybe I won’t.