Great Gatsby (eBook)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38708-3 (ISBN)

Infos

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. Glamour. Opulence. Excess. This is the world Jay Gatsby has created for himself, in hopes that he will one day capture the eye of Daisy Buchanan. But beneath all of this is an emptiness that no amount of money can satiate. And so the ever-elusive American dream he craves continues to shine on, as intangible as the green light that haunts him from the home of his beloved, over the empty waters and across the barren dock.

Best known for The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the Jazz Age, best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of this period. Alice Tye is a London-based illustrator and painter. Tye has exhibited across London and has worked for a number of companies and publications such as Moët Hennessy, Carlsberg and The Guardian.

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Beautifully illustrated by Alice Tye, this is cornerstone of modernist fiction and an incisive critique of wealth, class and the inescapable heartache of lost love. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. Glamour. Opulence. Excess. This is the world Jay Gatsby has created for himself, in hopes that he will one day capture the eye of Daisy Buchanan. But beneath all of this is an emptiness that no amount of money can satiate. And so the ever-elusive American dream he craves continues to shine on, as intangible as the green light that haunts him from the home of his beloved, over the empty waters and across the barren dock. Part of a select range of illustrated 'rite of passage reads' from Faber, which includes: Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Bell Jar, Maurice and A Room with a View.

Textauszug

II

About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her – but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.

‘We’re getting off,’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my girl.’

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage – Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold. – and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

‘Hello, Wilson, old man,’ said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’

‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’

‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’

‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly. ‘I just meant—’

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity – except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

‘I want to see you,’ said Tom intently. ‘Get on the next train.’

‘All right.’

‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

‘Awful.’

‘It does her good to get away.’

‘Doesn’t her husband object?’

‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York – or not quite together, for Mrs Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the newstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream and a small f lask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass.

‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ she said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have – a dog.’

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

‘What kind are they?’ asked Mrs Wilson eagerly, as he came to the taxi-window.

‘All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?’

‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?’

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

‘That’s no police dog,’ said Tom.

‘No, it’s not exactly a police dog,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of an Airedale.’ He passed his hand over the brown washrag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’

‘I think it’s cute,’ said Mrs Wilson enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’

‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you ten dollars.’

The Airedale – undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white – changed hands and settled down into Mrs Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weatherproof coat with rapture.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ she asked delicately.

‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’

‘It’s a bitch,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.3.2025
• Illustrationen: Alice Tye
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Jugendbücher ab 12 Jahre
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38708-X / 057138708X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38708-3 / 9780571387083