LOVE DOES NOT CONQUER ALL - A review on The Great Gatsby

 “His unkindness may defeat my life, but never taint my love”
                                                                                                  
                                                                                          -Othello (Act IV Scene II)

The dust settles, making things a little more clear. 

Love is blindness.

Imagine where all your life you truly believed something to be your always, your strength, your faith and your hope. And then in comes a storm so strong, so scary, and so enthralling and rattles your very soul to such depths, it makes you want to inquisite every single feeling you have ever perceived. It obsesses you, possesses you and makes you want to question the best thing you thought you had in this entire world and you only cross examine because that is when that forever, or so u thought, starts to look like an inevitable hollow destiny. And the very prospect of it all can scare and waver and surprise even the most focused strongest spirits making them do the most absurd things in this universe. 

Set in the era of a roaring 1920’s in New York where the rise in stock markets and the downfall of the prohibition era gave birth to a culture of bootlegging, loose morals, burlesque bars, lavish parties, orgies, mind numbing jazz-music, illicit affairs, deceitful relationships and gossips, in comes Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate, aspiring writer, bondsman, sometimes sarcastic, optimistic war veteran and the narrator of this lavishly beautiful tragedy, from Midwest.

His curiosity for this glittering thrilling Big Apple life leads him to such crossroads of trust and lies that by the end of it all , he’s left disgusted by this selfish and moral slaying city of unspoken sins making  him question, IF TRUE AFFECTIONS EVER EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE?

But the main portion of his curiosity was dedicated to his strange and inexplicably wealthy neighbour ,who came out of nowhere in the lands of West Egg, hosting as grand as a circus parties for strangers with no invitations, no reasons and no one to really care about it in the first place. In between all the secrets and the affairs comes out the reasons of how this man is able to throw these ridiculously huge parties and why.

Such is the story of The Great Jay Gatsby, the mysterious billionaire, war hero with a shady business and a healthy obsession for Daisy Buchanan, the beautiful young effervescent golden girl, if shallow and self absorbed at times who wants to have it all, whom he fell in love with as a young officer stationed in the south during the World War I and also lost to the blue blooded Ivy league philistine Tom Buchanan, and now hopes to get her back and turn things to exactly how they used to be.

A point comes where Gatsby’s “Old sport”, Nick, almost becomes his voice of reason by trying to make him understand that one cannot repeat their past. Gatsby’s careless smirk only makes you feel for him just like Nick does when he discovers how blind, deep and ceaseless this man’s love is and what would happen when his reverie would be shattered into billions of pieces by that one “hope” in the shape of a narcissistic pompous Daisy Buchanan.   

And indeed by the end, universe becomes a witness to what a blind love and faith can do to someone. L'amour ne conquiert pas tout (Love does not conquer all).      

Can obsession be positive?

Sir Fitzgerald has penned down his conclusion to this open ended question beautifully by making Daisy’s confusion between Tom and Gatsby and Jay Gatsby’s unwavering faith in their true love with the hopes to recapture it all just like the old times, as the central conflict of the story.  

A must read and a must watch. A classic masterpiece written by F.Scott Fitzgerald and Baz Luhermann’s breathtaking ability to imagine and pour down the right amount of the swanky and carelessly rich New York along with a dark and stone broke New York, THE GREAT GATSBY is one such special kind of hard cocktail that would mostly definitely be preferred by the Literature, FitzGerald and Leonardo DeCaprio fans.     

I know I can say that because I found myself getting lost into that world pretty dam easily.

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