Thursday, January 04, 2007

One man's all-time favorite ...

... 'Gatsby': The Greatest Of Them All. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

1 comment:

  1. "Great" means not just good, artistic, well-crafted, but also "large." Gatsby has scope-- but is still a novella encompassing a fairly narrow world. The vastness of America is alluded to, albeit very well!
    A "greater" novel (I won't name Melville's obvious example) is The Octopus by Frank Norris. It's vaster, much more ambitious-- and not without its own artistry. Not the artistry of well-crafted sentences (which the reader doesn't notice once he's into the story) but the artistry of constructing a coherent narrative encompassing many characters and plot threads; a narrative which builds in power and meaning throughout the course of the novel, before exploding with crashing emotional power like a great symphony.
    "Great"! We'd give two or three of Beethoven's symphonies that designation, but not his Moonlight Sonata, as evocative and artistic as that is.

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