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Dec. 14th, 2018 07:23 pm
selenak: (The Americans by Tinny)
The contested legacy of Atticus Finch is a smart article about not just fictional Atticus but Harper Lee's rl father, and the very different ideological uses To Kill a Mockingbird was and is put to. (Am both appalled and amused in a sick way to learn Republicans referred to the Kavenaugh hearing as "our Atticus Finch moment".) I would say Go Set A Watchman is more complicated than the article writer thinks, but gratified my guesses as to why the earlier novel was rejected and Lee was told to focus on the childhood stuff (from which Mockingbird emerged) appear to be correct: Atticus is what the historian Isabel Wilkerson has called “a gentleman bigot,” and “Watchman” is full of stilted exchanges between a benighted father and his more enlightened daughter. It wasn’t only bad storytelling; it was the sort of story that editors didn’t want to tell about the South. When Esquire refused a submission from Lee on the grounds that her Klan-hating, segregation-loving white characters were “an axiomatic impossibility,” she lamented to a friend that, if that were true, “nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”

Realistic or not, the early, overtly racist Atticus of “Watchman” was rejected by nearly every publisher that met him. Tay Hohoff, an editor at J. P. Lippincott, decided to take a chance on Lee, but encouraged her to abandon the didactic, abrasive scenes between adults and focus on the manuscript’s endearing childhood scenes.


In other news, the Atlantic posted their choice of the 25 best tv episodes of 2018. Now I haven't watched the majority of the shows these are from, so can't judge those choices, but of those three I did watch: Bodyguard, episode 6: certainly delivers the adrenaline pumping and the sheer suspense, but makes a couple of questionable writing choices; The Last Kingdom, s3 episode 6, aka the one where Uthred and Brida mourn - with you there, critics, that one was brilliant -; and The Americans season and series finale, START - again, good choice, it was superb, though I didn't interpret the choice Paige makes in it as being "between her family and her country".

I don't have the time right not for my own list of great episodes of 2018, but it's certainly something I could do in January, which is my subtle hint that there are still free slots in my meme posting schedule. :)
selenak: (Branagh by Dear_Prudence)
Doctor Who:

Casting news: Cut just in case it's considered spoilery. )

Harper Lee: when you're a dead writer of note, your letters will be published sooner or later. These sound as if they contain some gems, including this reaction to Obama's inauguration:

In one letter, dated 20 January 2009 – the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration – Lee wrote to Itzkoff: “On this Inauguration Day I count my blessings … I’m also thinking of another friend, Greg Peck, who was a good friend of LBJ. Greg said to him: ‘Do you suppose we will live to see a black president?’ LBJ said: ‘No, but I wish her well.’”

Well, what do you know: LBJ, female black president predictor? Am trying not to be depressed at the thought of what Harper Lee and Gregory Peck would say to the current occupant of the White House. Otoh, Lyndon Johnson (at full power, unhindered by depression) - let loose on the Orange Menace could have been quite something, because Johnson could out vulgar anyone any time, was excellent at destroying people in his way and above all could whip the Senate into shape. Also, [personal profile] muccamukk, Gregory Peck fan extraordinaire, did you know he was buddies with LBJ?

Meanwhile, in depressing reality:

Leaked White House Memo detailes more war on women's health

Because general war on women isn't enough, it seems the Orange One has picked a fight with a soldier's widow and a Congresswoman both last week. You know, I don't get (much of) the US re: soldiers. In no other country I can think of is there such a cult like reverence for "our boys" in everyone's (independent of party) rethoric and such a lack of care for veterans with ill health (unless, of course, they're politically useful generals) and families of dead soldiers in reality. Anyway, good article on the subject of the widow in question: Myeshia Johnson stands up to Donald Trump.

Lastly, the Mary Sue has an article looking back on The Stepford Wives. (The film based on Ira Levin's novel.) I think what gives it - and the trope it coined - its enduring power is that the disturbing answer it provides do the "what do men really want from women"? question is today still all too plausible. No, of course not all men. Etc. But enough.
selenak: (Default)
Very enjoyable, but not quite what I'd hoped for, by which I mean I wanted to love it and didn't, though that might partly been to having had wrong expectations.

What I thought I would get: first of a series of detective novels starring Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children.

What this is: one off novel about Harper Lee's and Truman Capote's childhood friendship. In the course of which they also play detectives (this, btw, was a rl thing, complete with cosplaying Holmes and Watson), but in the way children do, i.e they're looking for a mystery but when they eventually hit on a "mystery", it isn't really one, more of a shaggy dog story their imagination makes into more, though they come up with a few correct conclusions in between. At any rate, it's not the main plot of the novel, which is very reminiscent of, say, Tom Sawyer in the way it's structured, i.e loosely connected anecdotes and a few lingering plot threads.

I should add that it takes enormous guts to tackle the childhood of these two writers, since they've milked it for their own fiction. Which means at least part of your readers will have fictionalized alter egos of two masters of their art in their heads, though this book definitely is written primarily for children as readers. (Who presumably wouldn't have read Capote, even if they should have watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Neri wisely doesn't try to imitate either of their narrative voices, and sticks to third person, sometimes in Nelle's and sometimes in Tru's perspective, though as an appendix he has fun with some Capote and Harper Lee pastiches in the form of first person narrated short stories his child heroes have supposedly written during the course of the novel. (As he mentions, the real short stories were lost, so he gives his versions, which are fun to read, and good natured stylistic exercises to boot.)

Purely taken as a novel for children, it provides them with a pair of misfit heroes, with Tru the more unusual of the two, because tomboy heroines have been popular since decades, but as far as I recall, defiantly "sissy" boy heroes are not. If I were Neri, I'd have trusted my youthful audience more to get the point, because he repeats at least three times that part of what makes the Nelle and Tru friendship is that neither of them fits into gender roles (i.e she's seen as too much of a boy for a girl, he's seen as too much like a girl for a boy), but that doesn't take away from the charm of the combination. (Especially since neither does Nelle get more "feminine" nor Tru ore "masculine" in the course of the narrative; that's not how they influence each other.) Other than not fitting gender roles, our young heroes are also united by passion for books, a wild imagination and having living but absent mothers (Nelle's has mental health problems, Truman's is Holly Golightly a narcissist who can't stand having a child when she yearns to make it in the big city, and specifically can't stand this particular child - as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke once wryly noted, at least his mother ensured he'd never have a "am I gay?" Identity crisis as a teenager, because she told him he was way earlier than that.) Their fathers, otoh, couldn't be more different - Nelle's is her later model for Atticus Finch, Tru's is a charming conman who never pulls off a succesful con. (And isn't much around.)

The 1930s US South setting means the novel has to deal with race as well. There are two poc characters with lines and personality, a boy a bit older than our heroes, and the cook at Truman's aunts' house where he lives. The boy is the occasion for an early scene where Tru and Nelle face the local bullies; note that Nelle is incensed by the unfairness of the situation because she knows the black boy can't fight back (it's unthinkable), and that's why she intervenes, which I think as a way to signal both institutional racism and that Nelle, with the best of intentions and bravery, isn't free from some assumptions herself, it works. As for the cook, Neri tries his best to avoid the "Mammy" cliché, but of course she is an older black woman being roped into helping two white kids in an endeavor (and knowing she'll be held responsible if it goes wrong), and we're in the kids' pov, so while there's enough narrative information to make it clear she has her own life going on and doesn't live for young Truman, we still don't see her outside of how he relates to her. The Ku Klux Klan shows up twice in the novel, the second time in what I automatically assumed was an invented occasion in order to pay homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, because Nelle's father gets to face them down, but no, upon checking, the second occasion actually happened: when eight years old Truman was called to New York to live with his mother for a while, he threw himself a big Halloween farewell party (of course he did), and the Klan, objecting to the presence of the earlier mentioned poc characters among the guests, showed up. (KKK, Monroeville edition, deciding to crash eight years old farewell party is the type of thing that would be called hopelessly over the top if invented, so I should have known it really happened before googling.)

Sidenote: Because I read Go Set a Watchman last year (and of course To Kill a Mockingbird ages ago), I couldn't help but notice that the depiction of racism in Monroeville is markedly different in the prequel/rough draft compared to the other two. In Tru and Nelle, it's there, it's unfair, but most townspeople are benevolent, and the KKK are bumbling bullies and fools whom the good people naturally oppose. There's nothing like the creeping horror when in GSAW, in the adult Jean Louise's pov, she realises that it's everywhere and far from limited to unpleasant brutes.

Back on reviewing track, technical details: Neri gives the child Nelle a Southern accent to be phonetically transcribed, but not the child Truman (though Nelle's has disappeared by the end of the novel from her dialogue) - no idea how accurate that is. Some of the other characters talk in it, too, which is always a bit tricky for me as a foreigner to read. I couldn't help but notice that when they play out their Sherlock Holmes scenarios, Nelle is Watson while Truman is not Holmes but Sherlock, and here I cried foul and clear influence of not one but two more recent tv incarnations. :) (She would have called him Holmes!) This being said, it only made me wish more for the child detective series I had imagined this to be the start of, because I could have read tons more about these two fighting crime.

In conclusion: I liked but didn't love, and now hope for fanfiction providing more and going deeper. This is such a delightful friendship through the decades before the two lost each other in the wake of In Cold Blood and Truman's alcoholism-fueled assholery and self destruction. And in addition to the fighting crime tales, I want the superheroes AU. Because clearly Nelle would have made a great superheroine (complete with shock realisation about mentor) and her withdrawal from the public eye was so she could superhero undetected. Truman provided the intelligence in their investigations by befriending every supervillain ever and making them spill the beans.

Briefly

Aug. 10th, 2015 06:42 pm
selenak: (Philip Seymour Hoffman by Mali_Marie)
Not dead, just busy hiking through mountains and marathoning Orange is the New Black. However, I did hear the good news about Sense8 getting renewed. I'm glad. It wasn't perfect, but there was a lot to love about it, and room for improvement in the first season is almost a given.

Also: This article makes me wonder, like the author quoted, why no one wrote a novel about Harper Lee and Truman Capote's childhood friendship before. I'm now very curious about this one. (And amused the author got the idea while watching Capote, because yes, the Harper Lee scenes therein are golden.)
selenak: (Claudius by Pixelbee)
The conference doesn't start until this afternoon, and I got up early, so I had the chance to read it - it's not a long novel. Overall verdict? As a novel - a debut novel, even, which it would have been had it been published when it was written - , it has both strenghts and weaknesses; you can see both why her editor rejected it in this form and why the editor in question also realised this writer had huge potential and there was something there which deserved, nay, demanded further development. The weaknesses, unspoilery: in the last third of the novel the characters spout rethoric of the day, ideas and exposition at each other, they have a tendency to feel more like Shavian mouthpieces, if that makes sense. Which isn't true for the rest of the novel. The solution to the central emotional conflict also feels - not wrong for the characters, but wrongly reached. (I'll get into details why in the spoilery part of the view.) Especially as this involves a character (not Atticus!) doing lots of mansplaining to our heroine. Oh, and I'm not sure whether this counts as a weakness or not, but the narration pov is a bit inconsistent - ist's mostly Jean Louise's/Scout's in third person, but there are two or three passages where we're suddenly in Henry/Hank Clinton's or Atticus' pov.

The strengths, though: Harper Lee was already a wonderful wordsmith at this stage. And the characters - both the ones who'd make it into To Kill a Mockingbird and the ones exclusive to this book - are drawn vividly, at once coming to life in a few sentences and staying that way. The flashbacks to Scout's childhood and adolescence feel organically interwoven with what she experiencs in the present. Btw, interestingly enough, only the first of them feels like it could be in To Kill a Mockingbird (and maybe it is, it's been so many years since I've read the novel - a hilarious Scout-Jem-Dill escapade), whereas the others are in an era Mockingbird stays away from, after Scout starts to menstruate at age 11 and thus is rudely reminded her body is female, and the effect this has on her. The ignorance about sex at school in the stories the girls there tell each other, coming with a matter of fact aside comment (not related to any of the plot, so I mention it here) by one of her schoolmates about two other girls being taken away by social services because the older one got pregnant by her own father. (Mockingbird implies that Mayella Ewell got raped by her father, but it's not spelled out explicitly, and I think the movie skips the implication altogether.). Flashback!!Scout in Go Set A Watchman lives far more acutely aware of being female (and not wanting to be), and what can happen to girls, than the pre-pubescent child in To Kill A Mockingbird. Present day Jean Louise hasn't resolved all her gender issues but is on somewhat better terms with being a woman, especially since she's seeing men (all but one) with a far more jaundiced eye.

Then there's the build up. I now wish I hadn't read the advance reviews, though then probably I wouldn't read the novel for months, because the big twist/revelation isn't something Lee drops her readers into right at the start. It's very skillfully done. The hypothetical 1950s reader not knowing any of these characters would have taken a great liking to most of them as our heroine returns to the town of her childhood. There are a very few hints of what's to come (far more noticable to a current day reader), but no more than that, though they increase, and by the time Jean Louise finds out what shocks her world to the core, even a hypothetical first time reader with no To Kill a Mockinbird knowledge whatsoever would have been as shocked as she was, because this novel has done spoilery things. ) The immediate emotional fallout for our pov character, the disorientation, the desperate attempt to reconcile the past with the present, all this is captivatingly written. (It's only once we move past the fallout-and-trying-to-find-explanations part that we get to the characters turning into Shavian mouthpieces weakness I mentioned earlier.) Aching, but very well.

Also: the novel doesn't let its heroine off the hook, either. There are two very powerful scenes were Jean Louise, as we'd put it today, is called on her privilege. The first is when she visits Calpurnia (too old now to work for the Finch family, but previously introduced in flashback as a firm and loving presence through Scout's childhood and adolescence) in the wake of the big twist and as part of her quest to try and make sense of it all. And that's when she gets, if possibly, an even bigger shock.

Spoilery text passage )

That's the end of the scene (Jean Louise is talking to Calpurnia's son in the next line, which opens a new one), and wow. There really is nothing more to be said. And if nothing else, I think it justifies the publication of this novel, because what (few) criticisms of To Kill a Mockingbird I've read usually also concerned the black characters being presented as universally in awe of their white savior.

The other scene I was referring to takes place between Jean Louise and Henry, and Henry is another case in point of this novel answering, unintentionally, to one of directed-at-TKaM few criticisms, this time about the classism in the depiction of "white trash" . Because Henry Clinton comes from a "white trash" family, and Atticus' sister Alexandra has a rant about that to Jean Louise early on ("We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash (...)Henry is like he is now only because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash won't wash out of him"). I hasten to add that Alexandra is presented as a snob and Henry sympathetically at this point; it's this speech which brings a very pissed off Jean Louise nearly to agree to marry him. When, much later in the novel, Jean Louise and Henry finally have their conversation about the big twist, Henry's reply to the obvious question she asks him goes right at the hart of this difference in their origins, and what it means for his day-to-day existence in Maycomb:

another spoilery text passage )


Neither Jean Louise nor the novel takes this as an excuse for the larger issue, but neither is Henry's point re: the differences in how people react to them denied.

Btw, before I talk about more serious issues and how they're dealt with, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out another strength of the novel: the humour of it. Not just in some of the childhood scenes. An example of the bantery (and unspoilery) dialogue between Jean Louise and her father Atticus early in the novel, before the twist, which refers to something Henry alludes to in the spoilery passage earlier. Aunt Alexandra is just chiding Jean Louise about the rumour Jean Louise and Henry were swimming in the river naked:


"Your father will die, simply die, when he finds out."
Atticus was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets.
"Good morning," he said. "What will kill me?"
Alexandra said, "Im not going to tell him, Jean Louise. It's up to you.
Jean Louise silently signaled her father. Her message was received and understood. Atticus looked grave. "What's the matter?" he said.
"Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the river in the middle of the night with no clothes on."
"H'r'm," said Atticus. He touched his glasses. "I hope you weren't doing the backstroke."


Conversely, here's Jean Louise teasing her father at breakfast re: coffee:

'Still haven't learned how to drink it?'
'No,' said her father.
'Whiskey either?'
'No.'
'Cigarettes and women?'
'No.'
'You have any fun these days?'
'I manage.'



You can see what I mean about the characterisation build up within this novel. As an example of a characterisation of even minor characters in a few lines, here's Dill, the character inspired by Harper Lee's childhood friendship with Truman Capote, who shows up only in flashback in Go Set a Watchman but is occasionally thought of by Jean Louise in the present, too.

re: Dill the child: He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat. He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.

Dill the adult, during the novel's actions abroad (currently in Italy): He was a born wanderer. He was like a small panther when confined with the same people and surroundings for any length of time. She wondered where he would be when his life ended. Not on the sidewalk of Maycomb, that was for sure.


Aunt Alexandra (whom I don't recall from TKaM): Alexandra was the last of her kind; she had river-boat, boarding school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was a disapprover; she was an incurable gossip. When Alexandra went to finishing school, self-doubt could not be found in any text-book (...).


It's this wit and affection for the characters on the narrator's part which makes the twist and theme extra painful.

Now it gets truly spoilery again. )

Well. No wonder Jean Louise runs around in the later part of the novel inwardly alternately reeling, wondering whether everyone around her went crazy or whether she did, and generally asking WHY?, feeling horribly betrayed and wondering and how both past and present can be true. Unfortunately, the narrative resolution to all of this brings me to the novel's weaknesses again.

Spoilers abound )

Finally a bit of Mockingbird-related musings: when choosing to shift the story to Scout's childhood and make the trial the big plot, Harper Lee and her editor went for a dramatically more satisfying and far more clear cut tale. However, it also meant a lot of the ambiguity is lost. Go Set a Watchman doesn't have heroes and villains, per se. I mean, there is the boo-hiss racist O'Hanlon making a speech at the courthouse, but he's barely in the book, just in that one scene, not a character as much as a plot device to galvanize Jean Louise's discovery. Everyone else, including Jean Louise, has prejudices in different degrees (though she thinks she has none) but also good intentions. It doesn't make some of their actions less devastating. I think there is more than one good book hidden in this one. The one we actually got in Mockingbird, certainly. But I can't help but wondering what would have happened if the editor, instead of advising Harper Lee to go for the childhood scenes, told her to jettison Uncle Jack the Mansplainer, curb the speechifying in the last third of the book and not to stop redrafting until the final two confrontations were the best they can be? US lit is so obsessed with father/son relationships; daughter/father, when not about the father being emotionally withdrawn (this isn't Atticus' problem at all), is still far rarer.

Or: a Calpurnia pov novel. That scene between Jean Louise and Calpurnia in just a short space gives us an impression of Calpurnia seeing her life with the Finch family so radically different from how Scout saw it, without negating Scout's pov, either, and it would have been fascinating to read an entire book of that.

In conclusion: won't become one of my favourite novels, but I'm glad to have read it.
selenak: (Kima Greggs by Monanotlisa)
In theory, I know that the History Exchange won't go live until the 19th, but in practice, I keep checking it. Ah, that itchy feeling of wanting to read the other stories and wanting others to read yours...

Speaking of reading, To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't have the iconic status in my part of the world which it has in the US (and Britain?). Of course it's been translated, and I did read it as a teenager, not in school but because the aunt I was staying with during my vacation had a copy and I had read all her other books already. I liked it, was suitably outraged by the injustice and charmed by the family, but I had no idea it was considered a classic elsewhere, nor did I feel the need to read it more than once. When I saw the film version on tv about a decade later, I remember thinking "wasn't Scout more central in the novel? Why is there so much Jem and Atticus in the movie instead?" , but otherwise also liked the film. (BTW, at that point DS9 was already running, but I certainly had no idea that Joseph Sisko, Ben's father, was played by the same actor who played Atticus Finch's client.) The "like" never extended to "love". It was only after starting to consume English language media on a regular basis that I realised quite how iconic Mockingbird was in the English speaking world, and specifically Atticus Finch.

(Truefax: they changed birds and verbs for the German title, which is "Who Disturbs a Nightingale?" - "Wer die Nachtigall stört", which meant some confusion on my part at first once I read allusions to the original English title.)

All of which means I had no emotional stakes when earlier this year the news got out that Harper Lee's earlier written yet never published novel Go set a Watchman would be released this year, at least as far as the book itself was concerned. The "do we even know whether or not this is something she'd want since she's such a recluse and hardly communicates with the outside world"? debate did affect me, because the idea of an author unable to control what texts are released under her name is disturbing to me. (Switching genres and literary status, this is why V.C. Andrews' family endlessly churning out ghost written books under her name after her death remains repulsive to me. By all means, licence sequels and what not, but be honest about it and have them published under the names of their authors. I don't care whether the author in question used to write highly praised literature or pulp fiction, only texts she or he actually wrote should be published under their name.) Especially considering that the fictionalized version of Harper Lee in the movie Capote was a very endearing character, and when I subsequently read a non-fiction Capote biography, this came across as a good depiction. However, a lot of articles later the general media consensus seemed to have been that this was indeed Harper Lee's novel and she wanted to have it published, and so ended my emotional concernedness. I wasn't very curious about the novel itself. I would, I thought, eventually get around reading it, but it wasn't a priority.

Which has changed since yesterday, when I read the spoilery advance review in the New York Times. At this point, I immediately pre-ordered it in its kindle edition. Not because the review was all praise, but because it was all shock, and what it was shocked about made me go "This sounds fascinating". By necessity, spoilers ensue. )

The main reason, though, why I suddenly want to read this novel as soon as I can is that it now offers an emotional experience I can identify with. Not re: my father, but I have several older relations and also old (literally, as in aged) friends utterly unrelated to me who had a similar development to Atticus Finch in the new novel. ) I don't expect a novel, no matter how well written, to make it easier for me, but I really want to know how it depicts it.

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