Someone once said that books furnish a room. They also change our lives. We go to books for consolation and companionship, to be transported, moved and entertained, sometimes even to be terrified. The books furnishing our rooms tell the story of our lives and also help us to make sense of them.

This keynote speech doesn’t tell you what or how to read. Instead ‘1000 Stories to change your life’ celebrates the transforming power of literature. Peter de kuster draws the arc of a life story lived in books, from birth to death.

This keynote speech of Peter de Kuster is a reminder of the difference that books make.

The Great Gatsby A book that changed my life

Everything that can happen to a writer happened to Scott Fitzgerald – success, failure, Hollywood, alcohol and the crack-up, but the most imiportant thing that happened to him was that he was able to create in one noveal an absolutely perfect marriage of style and subject.

Like all good artists, Fitzerald’s style changed as he changed, and as his word changed and his subject deepened, but the Great Gatsby is the high point of everything., because it is the book in which he managed to capture the meaning of his times in a very American language that is quite unafraid of its own beauty.

Like the best tragedies, The Great Gatsby is also a romance – not only that hopeless one that exists between the mysterious Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan with the green light at the end of her sharf, but between Gatsby and the possibilities of America itself. Nick Carraway, the narrator is rahter quietly possessed of a poetic vision, on that years to understand how it is to live and dream in the America of those days among a people blessed and tortured perhaps by their ‘capacity for wonder’. For Scott Fitzgerald there was something very personal in that sort of possession. He lived with it and one suspects his own blood is mingled with the flow of sentences in this story of Long Island hedonists.

It remains the task of a serious writer to enter his or her times with an appetite for the uncanny, the beautiful and the true, which might also mean the ugly. The Great Gatsby shies away from nothing and risks everything in order to be what it is – the perfect American novel.