The Great Gatsby / Великий Гэтсби. Книга для чтения на английском языке

I graduated from New Haven[5 - New Haven – университет Нью-Хейвена – частный исследовательский университет США, основанный в 1920 году в Нью-Хейвене, одном из старейших городов Новой Англии, в штате Коннектикут] in 1915 and a little later I participated in the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless[6 - I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.

The Middle West now seemed like the edge of the universe – so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. All my aunts and uncles talked it and finally said, “Why – ye-es,” with very serious, unsure faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after all I came East, forever, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city. A young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a nearby town. He found the house, a weather-beaten bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm sent him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had an old Dodge[7 - Dodge – марка автомобилей, производимых американской компанией «Крайслер»] and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom[8 - muttered Finnish wisdom – бормотала под нос финские премудрости] to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man asked helplessly the way. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. And so with the sunshine I had that familiar feeling that life was beginning over again with the summer.

It was by chance that I have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour, were separated only by a bay. They are not perfect ovals but their physical alikeness, I think, is very confusing to the gulls that fly overhead.

I lived at West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two. My house was at the very tip of the egg, and squeezed between two huge places.