New Books In Literary Studies
Sarah Churchwell, “Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby” (Virago, 2013)
- Author: Vários
- Narrator: Vários
- Publisher: Podcast
- Duration: 0:44:47
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Synopsis
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a realistic depiction of the ’20s themselves. But what of the ’20s? These years are, today, so coated in mythology that they’re hard to imagine as a real time in which real people lived. The myths surrounding Fitzgerald and his novel are equally entrenched, but Sarah Churchwell‘s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (Virago, 2013) goes a long way towards peeling back the layers that have accrued around all of this- the author, the novel and the time- to, in her words, “throw into relief aspects of the novel we no longer see.” Here, the world of the ’20s- a world that so often seems impossibly ephemeral- assumes solidity through small details: hem lengths, traffic signals, the brightness of t