18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Robbins was not the best choice for voice., March 31, 2005
This review is from: The Great Gatsby CD (Audio CD)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my all time favorite novels. I have read it a few times and decided I would like to have an audio copy for my car. I should have heeded the advice of another reviewer who complained of Tim Robbins' reading of the characters.
First of all, he gave every single woman character a dimwitted Southern accent while most of the men had a New York accent.While I admit the characters were written as somewhat vain and shallow, they were not intended to sound perpetually drunk and/or stupid. He did a fine job as Nick Carraway, the narrator, but to hear this guy do Gatsby is a disappointment to say the least. To hear Tim Robbins tell it, Gatsby sounds like each breath is to be his last as if he is suffering the onset of a stroke or some such unpleasantness. Also, he is a little sloppy when switching from dialogue to regular prose.
I still enjoyed the CD because the story is so phenomenal, but a different reader would have made it much better.
On another note however, the sixth and final CD contains the readings of some of F.Scott's letters to publishers and others writers etc... The reader is someone else (sorry, I forget the name) and he does a nice job of the readings. One feels as though they are listening to the real Fitzgerald. For diehard fans, this little extra makes the whole thing worth the $19.
I hate to rip on Robbins as I find him to be an excellent and versatile actor, this however, is simply not his cup of tea.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yes!, March 28, 2005
This review is from: The Great Gatsby CD (Audio CD)
The quality of F. Scott Fitzgerald's immortal masterpiece is so self-evident that it would be almost hubris for me to comment on it--those of you who had it imposed on you during high-school owe it to yourselves to taste it again as free-willing adults.
Still, here are a couple words on The Great Gatsby (the book) for the benefit of those who have not read it. This work has become one of the literary symbols of the Jazz Age: it deals with the friendship between the narrator, honest and prudent Mr. Carraway, and Jay Gatsby, the young millionaire whose mansion on the New York sound is the theater of dazzling and fashionable parties.
But who is Gatsby? How does he make his money? What in his mysterious past links him to Mr. Carraway's circle? And what shape will Gatsby's future take once his quest to revive ghosts of the past succeeds? The story unfolds on a powerfully dramatic stage--one that now breathes fashionable inanities on a young flapper's golden hair, now heaves with powerful omens that carry the story forward with inexorable force.
Indeed, trying to describe this book and what makes it so magnetic is a monumental task, surely not the province of a review on its audio-CD version. So I will confine the next part of the review to Robbins' performance and the set as a whole.
I find that Fitzgerald's prose possesses a particular melodic quality; this is why it is very effective when it's read aloud--especially by a professional actor. I am not a great consumer of audiobooks, but I find that Tim Robbins' interpretation of this classic is superb. You never have the feeling that you are being "read to" - he acts the novel out in a manner reminiscent of the radio-drama performers of the olden days.
The point-of-view character of Mr. Carraway is interpreted in Robbins' normal voice (as it should be), while the other personae are colored by the tasteful addition of well-chosen idiosyncrasies. For instance, the voices of the two main female characters (both from Kentucky in the story) are rendered with a pleasing Southern inflexion. Furthermore, the reading is never rushed, and a judicious use of pauses, hesitations and other acting devices make the words come alive in what is in my opinion a very successful edition.
Also a nice touch are the glimmers of 1920's dance-music played at the beginning and at the end of each CD, as well as the informative background on the novel's history (in Fitzgerald's own words) at the very end.
Recording quality is very good, and chapters are easily found by choosing between tracks. Overall, I found this edition to be very well put together, and I am extremely happy to have it in my CD collecion.
...There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights...
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good actors are not necessarily the best readers, December 13, 2004
This review is from: The Great Gatsby CD (Audio CD)
The fourth star is actually for the quality of the novel itself; "The Great Gatsby" is one of my favorite novels and surely the best in American literature. Every line in Fitzgerald's novel has a meaning and a purpose. The reading on this audio book was not the worst I've ever heard, but Tim Robbins needed a good director to work out the many problems in his reading. While there were generally good voice characterizations (except for the initial chapters' readings of Daisy and Jordan--who sounded like a very exaggerated version of Southern women but improved as the novel went on), the narrator's voice varied from sounding bored to a tempo more in keeping with Nick Carraway's feelings about the people in the story. Sometimes there were problems differentiating Nick's voice from Gatsby's, and Gatsby mostly sounded like someone falling asleep. In addition to characterization problems, there were small problems in sentence phrasing--perhaps caused by turning the page--and in pronunciation consistency. I suppose it's all right to have a character's name pronounced in a non-traditional way (as Wolfsheim's was), but to have it move back and forth between two pronunciations even when the same character is supposed to be saying it seemed to me a problem that a good and conscientious director could have solved.
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