The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, book of a lifetime: Melancholy, and unforgettable melody

For Vesna Goldsworthy, The Great Gatsby is a late love affair

Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2013 film version of The Great Gatsby (AP)

The Great Gatsby is hardly an original choice for the book of a lifetime. But until a decade ago it wouldn't have been so. It is, for me, a late love affair.

As a bookish teenager in semi-communist Yugoslavia, I had a Dostoevsky phase. It was followed by a Chekhov phase I never grew out of; I still believe that I understand Anton Pavlovich better than his wife, Olga Knipper, ever did. And it was not only the Russians. There were Mann and Rilke too, and a sequence of my compatriots, male and female.

At no stage did I feel even a tinge of Fitzgerald fever. I will risk embarrassment and admit to a touch of "Robert-Redford-as-Gatsby" fever when the film came out. Our eyes met across rows of dusty seats in a local cinema and it felt futile to resist his blond, Ralph Lauren-suited charm.

The film captivated more because of Gatsby's love than his money. The novel, when I read it soon afterwards, contained too many digressions from that love. At just 47,094 words, it sagged every time Fitzgerald abandoned Jay and Daisy. And even the love story seemed not a patch on the "Great Russians": Onegin, Vronsky, Zhivago. It felt so long perhaps because I was trying to read it in English; my English wasn't ready for Fitzgerald.

So it came to be that I was in my forties and teaching English when Gatsby finally found me. I had to read it for a lecture, and I wasn't looking forward to it. Then I opened the book and it started singing to me. I heard its melancholy, unforgettable melody for the first time. It felt as though I had never read the novel before.

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world", Fitzgerald writes of New York. I thought it impossible to see New York for the first time, and I thought it impossible to read Gatsby for the first time: some knowledge of them always precedes the first encounter.

Yet, here we were, my once broken English rising to the challenge of the book's shimmering, incantatory beauty, its elemental emotion so un-English that I felt it as my own. Fitzgerald became an honorary "Slav soul" and Gatsby not so much a book of a lifetime, then, but a late passion which grips all the more powerfully because you thought that you had lost that youthful "capacity for wonder".

Vesna Goldsworthy's new novel is 'Gorsky' (Chatto & Windus)