The Great Gatsby

"He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

These sentences were the most touchy ones for me while reading "The Great Gatsby". This is how the narrator describes Gatsby's smile in their first encounter in the beginning of chapter three. I just finished watching the 2013 movie and couldn't get these sentences out of my head while watching the movie!

As always for me reading the book was a far more splendid and joyful experience than watching the movie. I am happy I didn't watch the movie before reading the book. It doesn't mean I don't like movies based on novels but it just means I enjoy reading the books more. I was thinking maybe the very basic reason is how the author can elaborate on describing the characters in the text and that I go over these descriptions kinda obsessively over and over again. This would probably result in me being able to connect to the characters depicted in the novels more than the ones in the movies based on those novels.

I went through a few sentences of the book again after finishing the movie and one nice thing I either haven't paid attention to earlier or I have had but already forgot is the point where Fitzgerald describes Gatsby's face in a state as if he has just "killed a man". In that scene Gatsby kinda kills himself, he kills the personality he invented long time ago as Jay Gatsby.  

Now comes the most exciting part at least to myself. After reading the book a few months ago I went through the wiki pages for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and was blown away how their love affair was in parts similar to Jay Gatsby and Daisy's. Just read Zelda's biography and see how this young popular girl  in Montgomery Alabama, is similar to your image of young Daisy in Louisville Kentucky. Honestly to me it was even more unbelievable and in some senses more insane than the love Gatsby had for Daisy (for a delusion of being with Daisy... however you wish to put it) cause actually this thing happened just a few decades ago. Man! Human beings are weird species.