Go Set a Watchman: Harper Lee's Sensational Lost Novel Paperback – May 3, 2016

I think this is a brilliant novel. It's not perfect, and I don't entirely agree with its message, but part of the point is that you don't have to be perfectly on the same page with someone in order to listen to and value their perspective.In fact, I'm inclined to say that this is a better book than TKAM. Sure, the prose is a bit rough and awkward in the first couple of chapters, whereas TKAM is polished through and through. But it's also her first novel, so that's to be expected. By a third of the way through, the rhythm of the prose had smoothed out, and as I read on I found that it achieved several moments of aching beauty. Chapters 8, 13, 16, and 18 were absolutely pitch-perfect in terms of writing as well as storytelling. The technique of using snippets of conversations was used really effectively in several of these chapters, and I haven't seen it done in quite that way before. So there is some formal innovation in this book that there wasn't in TKAM.This story is also a much more daring one with more interesting politics than TKAM. I wonder if the reason it wasn't published earlier was that its portrayal of the South was too painfully real. It is a powerful illumination of a certain time and place and the people who lived in it. The characters live, breathe, and sometimes say things that are outright horrifying.This book says a few things that are hard to say in today's historical moment. The idea that the civil rights movement inflamed tensions between blacks and whites is difficult to acknowledge for many people, especially if they've gotten a whitewashed history of this time period in school. I think many people struggle to see how something that ultimately immense good could have any negative side-effects, even in the short term. For those of us who want to change society for the better, it's important to remember that even highly successful movements to bring about a better world necessarily involve some elements of destructiveness. In this case, the communal bonds of trust, which were rooted in entrenched oppression, broke down when the civil rights movement occurred - but that was a prerequisite to rebuilding those ties on a more equal basis. When all social relationships are descended from the social relationships instantiated during slavery, you can't make progress without destroying some of the foundations of those relationships. That hurts, and it creates backlash. Even formerly good people can get swept up in it and change for the worst. It's still worth it.That said, I don't think the Atticus of GSAW is as different from the Atticus of TKAM as people want to believe. In both novels, he is fundamentally a legalist. That's why he defends a black man accused of rape in TKAM and it's *also* why he is able to make himself sound reasonable and logical when defending his white supremacist views in this book. This is in fact what many white supremacists are like: perfect gentlemen on the surface, until you really pay attention to what they're saying and the implications of it. And even in TKAM, he wasn't such a progressive; a large part of his defense rested on the fact that the Ewells couldn't be trusted because they were white trash, Mayella was a lying whore, her father committed incest, etc. If you combine the rosy-eyed view of childhood* with the changes wrought by the heightened social tensions of the civil rights upheaval, it's perfectly believable to me that the Atticus of TKAM became the Atticus of GSAW. (*Yes, I am aware that TKAM is narrated by adult Scout. But given that she still presents her father as a hero in TKAM, it seems like that narration must have taken place sometime between when she reached adulthood and when she has her realization in GSAW. So she is an adult in terms of age, but she still sees her childhood through the eyes of her childhood self. She hasn't yet "killed" her childhood self who worships her father as a God and reached full adult independence.)The portrayal of gender in this novel is also unusual and complex. Jean Louise feels emotionally disconnected from femininity, but rather than declaring herself genderqueer or something she strikes an uneasy balance between trying to live as she's expected to and trying to be the person she really is. This alienated version of womanhood is disappearing now, as feminism continues to succeed in broadening the scope of what it means to be a woman and giving people other options than living confined in an uncomfortable binary role. And that's great. But it's also important not to forget what it was like back then, and how gender was seen differently. Jean Louise's lack of appropriate femininity was seen as a personal eccentricity. She didn't have consciousness-raising groups where she could find out that there were others like her - indeed, many more like her. Even tough, independent Jean Louise could get slapped, hard, by her uncle and not see anything all that crazy and offensive about it. That was what the world was like. The only other book I've read that captures the paradoxical position of gender-noncompliant women in the old South with this kind of nuance is Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe. (Yes, the early paragraph about her incompetence with machines was weird and probably should have been edited out.)By the end, I was in tears and felt the way I do when I've had a fight with *my* family over what I think is right. I felt like I *was* Scout. Usually, I'm not very interested in "coming of age" tales, but I think that's because I hadn't yet read any that spoke to my experience; this one did, even though Harper Lee and I are separated by 64 years. What an evocative portrayal of what it was like to be an unconventional young woman caught between her hometown and the big city, between the stickiness of a past that is never quite gone and the uncertainty of a future that is always just shy of being realized.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the controversies surrounding this book—regarding the timing and nature of its release, and the shocking reveals in the book itself, particularly the discovery that Atticus Finch, one of the most idolized characters in American literature, is a racist. Even though I pre-ordered the book, I worried that I’d risk ruining To Kill a Mockingbird for myself. However, when I received my copy on release day, I accepted that Go Set a Watchman was now in the hands of the public, for better or worse, and I decided I would make every effort to put aside all the controversies and read it on its own merits. To try and make of it anything more or less than what it is would be unfair to the author, in my opinion.And to my surprise, I ended up really liking Go Set a Watchman. I just started reading it a second time, in fact, the better to appreciate it.In the hope that I might help another reader decide whether or not to crack open this book, here are some of the things I kept in mind while reading:• In his review for The Guardian, Mark Lawson says, “The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. … Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family … However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work.” I decided to take the Mockingbird 1.0 view.• I thought of Watchman as a fascinating artifact from a parallel universe: What if Harper Lee’s editors had chosen to work with this draft—polish it up, revise the structure and pacing, but retain the basic storyline—instead of urging Lee to do a complete rewrite, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird?• The Bible verse the title is taken from sets the theme of the book. Isaiah 21:6 (KJV) says, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” This isn’t very telling, but it came together for me in verse 9: “And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” It did help to find out ahead of time that Atticus is revealed as a racist, because it certainly was a shock. Reading this passage from Isaiah also helped. I understood immediately that Babylon for Jean Louise (Scout) Finch is her beloved Maycomb, and the “graven images,” or idols, are the godly pedestals upon which she put all her loved ones, particularly her father Atticus and her childhood friend Hank.And here are the merits I appreciated in Go Set a Watchman:• This is not just a story about Jean Louise uncovering her beloved Atticus as a flawed human being; more broadly, this is a story about a young woman experiencing the painful but necessary transition of becoming her own person. I really identified with this aspect of Watchman.• The overall tone of Watchman, perhaps heavy-handed at times but no less truthful, is the old adage, “You can never go home again.” Before the big reveal about Atticus’ racist views, Jean Louise realizes upon coming home from New York for a visit that her gilt-edged childhood memories of Maycomb do not match up to what greets her in the present. One of my favorite passages is a conversation about Jean Louise’s discovery that a favorite haunt, Finch’s Landing, no longer belongs to her family but has been sold off to a hunting club. Childhood friend Hank teases Jean Louise about her disappointment: “I believe you are the worst of the lot. Mr. Finch is seventy-two years young and you’re a hundred years old when it comes to something like this.” To which Jean Louise replies: “I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning.”• Although there is a lot of alienation and pain in this story, there are also many delightful moments in which Lee reveals a fondness for the South in which she grew up. Another favorite passage of mine is when Jean Louise returns to an ice cream shop after recognizing its owner as Mr. Cunningham: “She was sitting at a table behind Mr. Cunningham’s ice cream shop, eating from a wax-paper container. Mr. Cunningham, a man of uncompromising rectitude, had given her a pint free of charge for having guessed his name yesterday, one of the tiny things she adored about Maycomb: people remembered their promises.” I love details like this, and as a Southerner I also enjoyed Lee’s vivid sketches of the Maycomb people, which rang true to me.• Watchman contains some heartwarming flashbacks with Jem, Dill, and Calpurnia, as well as a couple of telling scenes about Jean Louise’s early friendship with Hank. Yes, the flashbacks are a bit jarring to the flow and pacing, but recognizing that Watchman is not a fully polished final draft, I still treasured these scenes as precious insights into beloved characters I never imagined I’d be able to read in my lifetime.• As Michiko Kakutani points out in her review for The New York Times, “One of the emotional through-lines in both ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Watchman’ is a plea for empathy … The difference is that ‘Mockingbird’ suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while ‘Watchman’ asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.” What I got from reading Watchman is that while Atticus is still Atticus in many of the ways readers have adored him for decades, he is very much a flawed, prejudiced human being. Watchman does not in any way excuse Atticus’ racist views toward African-Americans, but it does encourage the reader, along with Jean Louise, to take Mr. Finch down from the godly pedestal and understand him as a mortal. I believe Lee is also urging readers to look inside ourselves and realize we all harbor prejudices of some kind.

It' s so easy to read. Harper Lee merely tells us a story. Her 2 books are as important as Uncle Tom ' s Cabin in Literature about the Black People.Why didn' t she write more books ?

It's a fabulous journey. It's a bit dragging at times. But it's worth every bit till you reach the beautiful climax. If the first part's USP was a courtroom drama then this part has "drawing room drama"! This part often not held in high ranks as its predecessor "To Kill a Mocking Bird" is no less in my views. I'd rather argue on behalf of the fact that it completes the full arc of the character Jean Louise Finch aka Scout!I could relate to her childhood experiences in the first part as much as I did with her grown-up time in this present book that we're talking about. Her relationship with her father and her town is what I see around in my society and my relationships these days. I'd suggest those readers who haven't read Ms Harper Lee's work in this book must read the first part just in order to understand the whole arc. I loved every bit of her story and the way the story has been told."Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends."It’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.Every man’s island, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.- Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

Sequel of "To kill a mocking bird", it can be read independently without problem. A vivid picture of the south of the US in the 50s.

Un libro que capta tu atención. Genera en ti un sentido de análisis de lo que está a tu alrededor.

Another thilling adventure, loved it! Finally a Worth Reading continuation of an emotional and mature story! I highly recommend it!