— THE GREAT GATSBY, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
He must have felt that he had lost the world he’d known, that he had finally defaulted on the impossible price of living so long with one dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is, and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world: material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about, neither by chance nor design … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the once-familiar trees.
— THE GREAT GATSBY, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT
The world took a moment to figure out what it was reading. Then another moment.
“At first glance, an English-to-English translation of The Great Gatsby would seem to be the very last thing we need. But The Great Gatsby has already been translated many times since its publication: into film by Baz Luhrmann, into life by Jay Z. In this context, Audetat’s translation is not only the most contemporary, but the most faithful.”18
“As the definitive fable of American success—the real, the imagined, and the imagined-as-real—Gatsby is still inexorably tied to its emblematic author, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and to its time, the 1920s. This translation of Gatsby is the same book, but with its colors refreshed, its lines reinforced, its themes reshaded. But most important, the novel’s tumultuous and defining romance with the nature of success is now filtered to us not through the experiences of the great literary star of another era, but through the great literary star of ours.”19
“The Gatsby for our time.”20
“The timelessness of The Great Gatsby is not evidence that we don’t need this translation—it is proof that we do. We deserve to read this book as effortlessly as the original readers did, without needing to time-travel back to a place of distancingly different idioms and issues. If you want to read the Great Gatsby in 2013, the way that Fitzgerald intended The Great Gatsby be read in 1925—read Audetat’s translation.”21
“I loved it!”22
“A landmark insult—not only to Fitzgerald and to Gatsby, but to literature itself.”23
“A joke. And not a funny one. F.”24
“The Emperor himself has come before the masses and declared himself naked—and still, people praise his robe?”25
“Has the world lost its goddamn mind?!”26
It was the last thing J. C. Audetat wrote, and the last thing he needed to write. He had now said all he had felt the need to say in his particular life. It was nothing that hadn’t been said before, but he had said it all better than it had ever been said in the language of his own time and place.
Which was, in fact, the only language he knew.
Audetat stayed at his home, safely surrounded with the rewards that the original mischief of the compromises of his artistic journey had brought him, as the buzzing of the many minds he had touched vibrated incessantly and harmlessly about him, around him, and through him, like radio waves, for the rest of his life.
It felt like poetry.
1. Nick Hornby, The Believer.
2. Janet Maslin, New York Times.
3. Harold Bloom, Yale Book Review.
4. Brian Lewis, Men’s Health.
5. Keith Gessen, N+1.
6. Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review.
7. Frank Rich, New York.
8. Camille Paglia, Salon.
9. Dan Chiasson, Harper’s Magazine.
10. Alan Green, New York Review of Books.
11. Natasha Vargas-Cooper, The Awl.
12. Chuck Klosterman, New York Times Book Review.
13. Lauren Leto, Glamour.
14. Ed Skoff, The Atlantic.
15. Lev Grossman, Time.
16. (reviewer anonymous), Gawker.
17. Andrew Sullivan, Times Literary Supplement.
18. Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club.
19. Alan Cheuse, NPR.
20. Tina Brown, The Daily Beast.
21. Marjorie Garber, Harvard Book Review.
22. Larry King, larryking.com.
23. Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times.
24. Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly.
25. Andrew Sullivan, Andrewsullivan.com.
26. Stephen King, private correspondence with Amy Tan.
Discussion Questions
? Did you think the book was funny? Why or why not?
? Did you flip through the book and read the shortest stories first? The author does that, too.
? What is quantum nonlocality? Be concise.
? Do you think discussion questions can be unfairly leading sometimes? Why?
? Who are we supposed to be discussing these questions with?
? Do you normally have discussions in response to a question that was posed by a person not participating in the discussion? Why or why not?
? Do you think “why not?” is ultimately a better question than “why?”
? Why or why not?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS