Skip to main content

The Great Gatsby: An Old Friend Encountered in My Edinburgh Study

The Great Gatsby: An Old Friend Encountered in My Edinburgh Study

 It is a curious thing, is it not, how one’s literary companions shift as the years climb upon our shoulders? In my youth, amidst the damp, grey comfort of Edinburgh, I clung to the existential dread of the Russians. I found solace in Dostoevsky’s fevered, suffocating basements and Tolstoy’s agonizing search for the soul. To the uninitiated, the Russian canon is often mistaken for mere misery; in truth, it is the most honest interrogation of the human condition ever put to paper. Those writers understood that life is a collision between our infinite desires and our pitifully finite circumstances. They painted the "existential terror" not as a ghost in the dark, but as the crushing weight of morality, the terrifying freedom of the individual, and the God-shaped hole that no amount of secular progress could ever hope to fill.

 Ah, but before I reached that level of gravitas, I had my own share of blunders. I recall sitting in a draughty university library, desperately trying to impress a young lady by name-dropping "The Great Legacy." Yes, I had, in a moment of unparalleled intellectual confusion, managed to conflate Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with Dickens’s Great Expectations. A rather amusing collision of Pip’s convict-ridden marshes and Jay’s gold-plated West Egg, I suppose. Looking back, it was a forgivable error-both stories are, at their core, about the grotesque, haunting architecture of hope.

 But as I settled into my fifties, finding solace in the quiet corners of history and the rhythm of Asian thought, I found myself returning, time and again, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Specifically, to that glittering, hollowed-out monument of American ambition: The Great Gatsby.

 To the uninitiated, Gatsby is merely a story about a bootlegger and a socialite. How dreadfully wrong they are. To read Gatsby is to witness the autopsy of a dream. And here, I find a profound resonance with the Korean sensibility. In my years of engaging with Korean literature—from the sorrowful laments of the Joseon poets to the modern urban isolation found in the works of Kim Seung-ok-I have noticed a shared frequency. There is a deep, abiding appreciation for the "beautiful failure.“
Koreans understand, better than perhaps any Western audience I have encountered, that success is often a hollow prize if it is untethered from the soul’s true origin. Jay Gatsby’s desperate attempt to "repeat the past" is not merely an act of delusional romance; it is a spiritual crusade. It is the refusal to accept the indifference of time. In the bustling streets of Seoul, where the relentless drive for the future often brushes against the ancient, lingering ghosts of tradition, one finds that same tension-the struggle to build a palace of the future while clutching a rose from a yesterday that has long since withered.

 

 Yet, why does the world-and particularly the cinematic lens—insist on resurrecting this ghost time and again? Why do directors feel the itch to frame Gatsby’s tragedy? It is because The Great Gatsby is the definitive scripture of the "Gilded Illusion." We live in an age that mirrors the 1920s with unsettling precision. We are currently witnessing a global epoch of hyper-connectivity and profound alienation, a time where the accumulation of wealth is shouted from the rooftops while the spirit starves in the basement. Cinema loves Gatsby because he is the patron saint of the nouveau riche and the desperate climber. He is the mirror in which we see our own frantic attempts to manufacture a "self" that is worthy of love. In Korea, a society that has undergone a metamorphosis so rapid it leaves one breathless, the story of Gatsby strikes a visceral chord. It is a cautionary tale about the corrosive nature of the "success story" that is divorced from the cultural identity.

 The literary value of this work remains unassailable precisely because it is a tragedy of scale. Fitzgerald managed to shrink the massive, grotesque sprawl of the American Dream into a single, tragic character. It is an exercise in economy-a lesson in how to build a cathedral of meaning out of the most brittle, ephemeral materials: gin, glitter, and a green light.

 

 Perhaps that is why I adore discussing this book with my Korean colleagues. They do not look for the triumph; they look for the tragedy, and in that tragedy, they find a curious comfort. We are all Gatsby, are we not? Chasing a green light that glimmers just beyond our reach, forever writing letters to a version of ourselves that we lost somewhere between the innocence of youth and the hard-won cynicism of maturity.

 So, raise a glass-not to the American Dream, which remains as elusive as it is treacherous-but to the dreamer himself. To the beautiful, impossible, and utterly human desire to turn back the clock, just for a moment, to that evening at seven, when the world seemed wide open, and the future was merely a promise we hadn't yet broken.

AI Image

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Han Kang: The Uncomfortable Truth

  The Unsettling Bloom: Reflections on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian    O ne might argue that literature exists primarily to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Rarely, however, does a work of art manage to do both with the clinical, shivering precision of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. As I sit here in my study in Edinburgh, watching the mist roll over the grey stone of the Royal Mile, the echoes of Yeong-hye’s transformation still resonate with an unnerving clarity.   The recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang is not merely a triumph for Korean letters; it is a long-overdue acknowledgement of a voice that has been quietly dismantling the structures of human complicity for years.   The Significance of the Nobel Recognition  F or those of us in the West, the Nobel often feels like an exercise in canon-building — a slow, ponderous dance toward what the Swedish Academy deems "universal." Yet, with Han Kang, the prize feels differe...
Read more »

[ 1Q84 ] - Haruki Murakami

   A Double Moon over Edinburgh: The Quiet Terror and Fractured Realities of Murakami’s 1Q84    The Scottish rain is particularly unforgiving this afternoon, hammering against the sash windows of my study as if demanding entry. I’ve just poured myself a rather generous measure of Laphroaig, entirely justified by the creeping dampness in my bones. It’s on days like this, when the edges of the world seem blurred by mist, that my mind inevitably drifts back to the surreal, unsettling landscape of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  I am, by nature and by circumstance, a skeptic. At fifty, bearing the invisible but heavy scars of a romance that spectacularly immolated my younger, more foolish self, I have little patience for literary sentimentality. The prospect of soulmates braving the cosmos to reunite usually prompts an involuntary eye-roll. Yet, Murakami managed to slip past my defenses, likely because he disguised a love story as a deeply unnerving psychological thriller....
Read more »

The Detective Who Understood the Human Heart

  The Detective Who Understood the Human Heart In Memory of Keigo Higashino (1958 – 2026)     I woke this morning to a grey, unremarkable Edinburgh sky and a phone screen that told me something rather less unremarkable: Keigo Higashino had died. Sixty-eight years old, taken by colorectal cancer on the twenty-third of July, though the world was not told until Kodansha's quiet, formal announcement four days later. There was a family funeral, already concluded, already private, already over before most of us had even learned to grieve. It struck me, reading it in my dressing gown with the kettle not yet boiled, how peculiarly fitting that was — a man who spent forty years constructing intricate puzzles for the reading public should exit so quietly, with the actual event of his death held back from us like the final chapter of one of his own novels. I confess I have rarely felt moved to write of an author's passing quite this way before. This morning, I find I owe him rather...
Read more »