reading gatsby in bahia

One of the things I miss most about the States is the public library around the corner from our house.

The school library here is woefully inadequate. It's a motley collection of castoffs from expats leaving the country, and new young adult novels with flashy covers.

I did find Sherman Alexie's excellent The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, as well as a picture book called What is Pot, featuring a stoned snail pointing to a sign that says, "pot is illegal."

For the most part, though, it's slim pickings.

Kind of reminds me of the Peace Corps, when one of the greatest deprivations I suffered was being forced, by lack of other options, to read Under the Tuscan Sun.

And I've never been much for rereading, I guess because there's always something new that I want to read.

But last week, combing the shelves yet again, I found Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. What an incredible book! How did I miss this when it first came out?

In any case, inspired by Nafisi's passionate engagement with the novels she discusses (as well as by the de facto fatwa on my own literary choices), I decided to go back to The Great Gatsby, which I hadn't read since eleventh grade.

I remember liking it, but my only recollection was those green lights flickering at the end of the dock, and the last line, about the boats borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This time around, I noticed how callow and superficial the characters were, even Nick, the narrator. And the plot is totally contrived.

Nonetheless, there's something so poignant about the novel.

Perhaps it's what Nafisi says: "They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future."

As Nick says at the end, "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I--we were all Westerners...

"Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio...even then it always had for me a quality of distortion."

For me, the poignancy (and the dream) is this idea that we can move beyond where we come from, to something better, some glistening city across the water, those glowing lights at the end of the dock.

And of course, reading Gatsby in Bahia, I can't help but see the wavering reflection of my own quixotic dream--the women in white dresses, rustling palms, the sun sinking into the Bay of All Saints.

I'm thinking about moving on to Jane Austen next.

And I'm curious: what are your experiences with rereading? Or how where you are influences how you read?

Any other suggestions for me, that a poorly stocked school library might have? Or any books you're done with that you might want to send my way?