Episode 82
June 24, 2025
The Great GatsbySolaris
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
This month, Suzanne returns to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, which celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Meanwhile, Chris has been checking out the work of Stanisław Lem, beginning with his classic science fiction novel Solaris. They discuss the joys of short novels and the desire for the unobtainable. Oh, and they celebrate Pride. Happy Pride!
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/spouter/episode/s/spouter-season-2.png)
Show Notes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.
Stanisław Lem: Solaris (trans. Bill Johnston). See also: Summa Technologiae (trans. Joanna Zylinska); A Perfect Vacuum (trans. Michael Kandel).
R.I.P., Edmund White. His books include Forgetting Elena, A Boy’s Own Story, and The Beautiful Room Is Empty.
The Great Gatsby (Herbert Brenon, 1926) is a lost film, but the trailer is available on its Wikipedia page.
The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974) and The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013).
Our episode on A Moveable Feast.
The Great Gatsby and World War II.
In addition to our episodes on The Blazing World and Frankenstein, we forgot that we have covered a proper science fiction book: Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue!
More Solaris and Lem talk can be found on Chris’s other podcast, which covered MST3K’s take on First Spaceship on Venus, a movie based on Lem’s first novel, The Astronauts (which is still not available in English).
Justine M. Pas: The Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (from the collection Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics) is the essay Chris refers to.
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) and Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002).
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990).
Pierre Bayard: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Also: How to Talk About Places You Haven’t Been, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, etc.
Our episode on The Tempest also had a lot of birds in the background.
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