Vo's prose, with its luxuriance and precise command of tone, has a meticulous quality to it, as if every word were a jewel laid out very carefully on a tray. Everything is new, and everything is familiar, all at once.īut Fitzgerald never managed writing as ravishingly beautiful as this. For those of you who read and loved the original Great Gatsby, it will be like returning to a love-worn poem that had melted away into half-remembered snatches and finding that it contained a new meaning. Nghi Vo reimagines The Great Gatsby with sensuality, queerness, and a glass-sharp beauty. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home? Certainly ugliness didn't, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. “Death doesn't come to Gatsby's,” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. And a glimmer of something else too, something sharp and treacherous beneath the smooth surface: shards from a mirror that tipped off a shelf and shattered and rivulets of molten blood and faint scratches from a single nail painted slick black. Still today, when I think back on the experience of reading it, I see freshly pressed silk slipping over skin and fingers sliding through hair and delicate cords of bright pearls shimmering on bare throats like sunrise on water. Oh, this book built such beautiful, ruinous, indelible images in my mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |