I just reread "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" for a class. My goodness, I saw more this time. I feel like the narrator is sitting within the ray of potential happiness, & he knows it, & he just can't get there. And perhaps he's felt that way for the longest time.
I felt sad for a whole day after reading it. It's as if he became my own flesh and blood. As if I was fading.
Somehow I've overwritten your post here corra. I think it is because I'm almost as bad a moderator as you were 
Accidentally wiping people out. Power goes straight to the keypress.
You said something like; 'le Carré - you'll need to read them all again"
He ran as he’d never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them. He ran directly at the bunker where the grenades from Jake’s M-79 were exploding. The bullets from the M-60 machine gun slammed through the air on his right, slashing past him, whining like tortured cats, cracking like the bullwhip of death. He ran, having never felt so alone and frightened in his life.
'Matterhorn' by Karl Marlantes
I really like this scene from my current read 'Matterhorn'. I like the inclusion of the soldiers motivation. The novel is fiction, however Marlantes, is a decorated Marine officer who commanded a Rifle Company during the Vietnam war. I feel that his experience lends a degree of authenticity to the novel. He was there and it shows through.
I'm also sure that if he'd workshopped his 'Matterhorn' manuscript here on tNBW he'd be advised to reduce the above passage to.....
Feeling alone and scared, he ran directly at the bunker where the grenades from Jake’s M-79 were exploding. The bullets from the M-60 machine gun slammed through the air on his right.
I like the repeat of "he ran" in this passage. This is where repetition works by emphasizing what is happening in the scene: the feet are running, the arms swinging, the character's moment is in rhythm. One can imagine the thought "keep running" playing over & over in his mind, so the form in this paragraph actually parallels the meaning. By repeating "he ran," the author emphasizes and elongates the moment.
I hope I'm not one who would cut this down. I often have CONDENSE on my mind. But I think in this case I'd see the force of the repetition and refrain from the suggestion to cut. Hard to say. That's why multiple editors is a good thing. 
Hers is never the POV of the author or the reader, her narrator POV is always in historical character and she never provokes our thoughts via juxtaposition between then and now.
I really like this observation.
That's probably why when something like this appears, it is so evocative. She is a very strategic writer! I think.
This is my read of the moment. I was struck by the initial passages. They open the story with a crash and engaged me instantly. The young Thomas Cromwell is beaten by his father. The scene is vivid yet almost devoid of description; how does she do that?
I saw a Shakespeare play once (Hamlet) where the actors dressed in plain white, and there were no props. The background was a black curtain throughout the play. The audience was expected to imagine Shakespearean clothes and props, the same way Shakespeare expected the audience to imagine a battle scene by tossing three actors on the stage. Wolf Hall opens with a list of the cast of characters, like a playbill. I think Mantel writes very much like a playwright. She doesn't have to describe much because with a brush of vivid acting, you see it yourself. Her expository style is very abrupt -- curt, like stage directions. Nearly everything is filtered through her characters' words and reactions.
Only my thoughts.
-- Sunset: the deep gold light streams through the open door of the Dwelling, kissing the dreary little square of screen, then seducing my gaze away and up and outwards. I have no one to talk to, so here I am talking to myself, again. Pretending someone really is listening, that they like hearing my voice, especially on such a glorious night. The beauteous twilight: it should have been the time to sigh from the deck of a yacht, to slip away down cobbled Parisian byways to an illicit, shuttered encounter, to slow down and distance the daytime turmoil with the chilled sparkle of champagne. Time to change clothes, change priorities, change mindset, change your life: be someone different. Up until my grandparents' time, this slow descent of the day was magic. It was the limbo time, the day on hold, the bridge between work and play. --
Firebricking it? I'm assuming this must be the opening of the novel? I've never read anything sci-fi, so I may be speaking against the standards of the genre. My reading tends toward the Victorians and the Modernists in England & America, so with that in mind:
For me, "sunset" followed by a colon is a little clumsy for an opening. That's like beginning "HUMAN BEING" colon, before describing a character. One shouldn't need to label the description to follow; one should make the description powerful enough to require no label.
Seducing the gaze "away and up and outwards"? We can assume the sun is above and outward? The author should use her word count for more pertinent details specific to her character's situation.
The colon after "the beauteous twilight" emphasizes twilight by separating it from the rest of the sentence. The colon makes more sense here than it did in the opening line, though I'm still not sure it's necessary. The author could simply delete "sunset" in the opening line, and have a stronger sentence. Likewise, she could delete "the beauteous twilight" and make this moment more personal: *I* should have been sighing from the deck of a ship, etc. Although I'm not sure (in an opening scene) if this list of "should have beens" actually helps ground us in the character's situation as the novel begins. I do get that the author is trying to establish restlessness. But that could be established far more succinctly.
I'd also note that in just the first paragraph, the author has twice used the label with a colon gimmick before beginning a description. This strikes me as habit rather than technique. One tossed in creates emphasis and a change in rhythm; two in a pace of a few sentences feels repetitive. And then comes:
*Time to change clothes, change priorities, change mindset, change your life: be someone different. Up until my grandparents' time, this slow descent of the day was magic. It was the limbo time, the day on hold, the bridge between work and play.*
This is a list of completely obvious observations about sunset that do nothing to enlighten me. The author is falling into comfortable rhythms rather than using the words and punctuation as tools toward a specific purpose. Which doesn't bode well in a first paragraph.
The fact that this heavy, yet completely unspecific, paragraph is followed by four more blocks of exposition and back-story is troubling. The scene hasn't begun yet. Who is this sun-watching person who should be on a yacht with champagne?
-- Familiar figures are drifting around as usual, some dancing, some just wandering in dreamy circles. All young, all half wearing neon clothes, floating and still flimsy, embedded yet unfettered as they are with technologies so light as air: hair gleams bright and long, flicking and swishing around smooth faces that see nothing, seek out nothing. But I study one or two of them, tracking the meaningless trajectories weaving under the precise, perfect panes of the expansive dome: my mind can only wander. --
So can mine! (Sorry.) "Familiar figures," "some, some, some," "all, all." These descriptions are generic & repetitive. "Floating and still flimsy, embedded yet unfettered." When an author starts paralleling her words like this, she needs to be underlining a moment to catch the eye. I can't imagine the near-rhyme was strategic here. There's nothing here to underline.
This opening would be far, far stronger (imho) if the author began within a scene actively playing out. This is five blocks of exposition which is not specific. I get out of this that we are in the future (which can be assumed by the book's title) and that the narrator is in some sort of prison. She speaks very distantly, without a single contraction, like a robot of some kind? For example, can anyone imagine a person from the next century saying "bedeviled"? That's more like two centuries ago our era?
Only my thoughts! Again, this isn't my genre. I'm not against sci-fi, but this feels very stilted and doesn't inspire (me) to read on.
Share an opening you love in literature, and describe how/why it drew you in.
Share a scene (or passage) in a work of literature that works, & say why.
(This thread was originally over here. I started it there before this group was formed.)
I just finished The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and a biography on Zora Neale Hurston. Before that I read Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill. So incredible. I love the crashing in on itself feel of that one. Probably the best play I've ever read. I also read Ariel by Sylvia Plath very recently. Brutal imagery. I think she's my favorite poet.
I'm about to start A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It's lying open behind me.
Wow, excellent news, Paul!! Congrats!
I thought when I wrote men's I should have written man's—as the graceful collective for humans, and meant to change it but forgot. I have resisted in my writing and conversation life the sensitivity of writing his/her and other affected gender collectives when meaning the collective human race we belong to. I know it to be prideful writing not pride of gender I'm beset with. All that said, man's was the proper word I meant to use to convey my thoughts, afflicted as they may be by narcissism.
I was only teasing, in lieu of the thread conversation which precedes this exchange. However, speaking as a woman? "Mankind" covers only half the species. We are actually "humankind." Using "man" rather than "human" may sound better in writing to some (and I certainly see your point about how choppy writing becomes when one must make his/her somehow match its antecedent), but "man" or "mankind" still suggests that the female perspective is the secondary perspective on the actual experience, which is male. If I referred to humanity as "womankind" or to history as "female" advancement, and suggested that this sounded better in writing than "humankind," and really it all means the same thing, you would perhaps see the difference.
There really is no way to get a clear look at history without being there. (I think.)
¿Being there? ¿As the best way to get a clear look at history?
Gonna have to disagree with you there, Corra, and try to bolster your dubiety. The History Machine—while I've been here—has churned out brumous propaganda meant to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Being there has served more to confuse than to teach me. Or as Mark Twain said, "Education consists mainly of what I have unlearned."
I think we may be speaking from two opposing perspectives on history. I (believe) you are suggesting that distance from history makes it far more possible to have an uncluttered view of it: a bird's eye look absent from the agendas of the moment.
I see the sense in that perspective. I'll illuminate my own viewpoint, which may better explain what I mean: I visited Chickamauga a while ago, & I was struck by the silence, the beauty, the peace at the site. It was incredibly lovely. Autumn leaves colored the scene like a tapestry. Deer clustered here & there on the landscape, & children laughed as they toured a site that must have made laughter impossible in 1863.
There's a monument (The Wilder Brigade Monument) at Chickamauga which allows visitors to climb up high over the battlefield and look down over the whole of it: a birds-eye view. This monument was not standing during the actual battle. I was struck (metaphorically) by the idea of that monument: as visitors after the fact, we can climb up and see it all, from the first historic moment of the battle to the last. But we can never experience it as it actually was -- before anyone knew the turns the war would take, when no one knew who would move where on that battlefield. The battlefield was chaos in 1863. No one knew how it would turn out -- and that's why no matter how many facts we accumulate, how many different witnesses to the moment, how many different perspectives and conjectures and agendas, we can never get back to the actual historical truth of any of it. Distance actually opposes true understanding. We bring the prejudices of our own era, the knowledge of our own anachronistic discoveries, backward in time. I say we can never really get at the truth of history because I will never, ever view life as a seventeenth century woman in colonial America the way a woman of the time would have viewed it. I've experienced life in the twenty-first century. I can assess it: but I can never see it as they did.
I think we both have perfectly valid viewpoints.
Mine is a backward look at man's advancement, an advancement hindered by and a history put into print by those in power, but reimagined from the mountain of man's accumulated moral structure and more eloquent language. I guess I'm saying what we truly know has been built brick by brick, word by word, thought by thought from living an examined life.
I think I understand what you're saying here. You are a philosophical assessor of history (it sounds like), while I am more interested in the camera view, in the moment. That's probably why you take to fictional perspectives on history, while I strongly pull to the primary documents -- what we have of them. There are so many ways to explore history, and I certainly respect yours.
Anyway, thanks for your perspective, Memphis! All the very best.
I think the technique of writing this paragraph within two long sentences helps to construct the Imagery.
Yes! I hadn't noticed that, but you're right: the entire image is delivered in a single line, which contributes to the feeling that it's emerging from the pages fully sketched! If the image had been split into a few lines, it wouldn't have the same effect:
"From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor. His short hair is parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead. His eyes blink incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he has just emerged into strong light. His lips nibble each other like nervous horses. His smile shuttles to and fro under a carefully edged mustache."
The scene now reads as a series of actions happening in that moment rather than continuously. The transformation of the "ing" verbs into straight present tense takes away some of the feeling that this scene emerges onto the page already happening.
I don't know if I state that well, but what a change, just slightly changing the verb tense and the punctuation!
Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan’t give you another chance.
Jacob hurries past the tomatoes and catches her up near the gate.
‘Miss Abigawa? Miss Aibagawa. I must ask you to forgive me.’
She has turned around and has one hand on the gate. ‘Why forgive?’
‘For what I now say.’ The marigolds are molten. ‘You are beautiful.’
She understands. Her mouth opens and closes. She takes a step back…
… into the wicket gate. Still shut, it rattles. The guard swings it open.
Damn fool, groans the Demon of Present Regret. What have you done?
Crumpling, burning and freezing, Jacob retreats, but the garden has quadrupled in length, and it may take a Wandering Jew’s eternity before he reaches the cucumbers, where he kneels behind a screen of dock leaves; where the snail on the pail flexes its stumpy horns; where ants carry patches of rhubarb leaf along the shaft of the how; and he wishes the Earth might spin backwards to a time she appeared, asking for rosemary, and he would do it all again, and he would do it all differently.
Thank you for sharing this one! I've never read David Mitchell, but my sister insists I would love Cloud Atlas. I love that the narrator's inner thoughts read almost like -- stage directions? "Act, I shan't give you another chance." My feeling while reading this is that I am above a dramatic scene, rather than immersed in an interior moment. The author has made this scene into a spectacle for public consumption rather than a confessional, internal moment. There's a sense that the author, and we, and the voices of regret, are sitting in judgment upon the narrator's very private moment.
That sort of clash between public and private, internal and dramatic, is textually interesting! Subtle words within the prose contribute to this feeling that we are watching: the "screen" of dock leaves puts (in my mind) a curtain. He has left the stage, he's ducking behind the curtain, the fatal moment is over, the performance is finished. He would do it all again -- he would do it all differently. He wants that first performance to have been a stage rehearsal.
The imagery of the insects underlines this sense that something is looking down on him: that he is utterly insignificant, like a snail or an ant.
"When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, the tide may turn."
Oh, my! This one is just lovely. I appreciate the long, flowing sentences, and I really, really like that opening line. The form suggests to me peaceful waiting which contrasts with the reality of the pain. If Mantel had chosen choppy sentences, she might have illustrated erratic pain with her form. Instead, she uses her form to create a gentle space. With her imagery of earth and sky horizons, Mantel creates distance from pain and describes the internal process of removing oneself from the moment as a means to endure it. In such serene terms, she creates danger in her final sentence: "The tide may turn." Here she seems to use a cliché to create a sensation of foreboding, but the cliché actually parallels the imagery of peace in the lines preceding. So the danger is present, and all too common (cliché), and yet somehow beside the point, because it is intricately tied to the peaceful space which she has established is woman's alone, in this scene. Lovely!
And look again at the famous Rule 13. Each clause, each phrase of the Rule illustrates itself! It is a brilliant piece of writing, and of rhetoric.
I'll do that!
So, I was reading The Elements of Style, prepared to shake my head at the all-or-nothing rules and feel smug and skeptical, and this scene jumped out (by a man who is honestly a favorite of mine, for he wrote the one book I read over & over & over when I was a child: Charlotte's Web).
(from the introduction -- White has been talking about how he came to edit his former professor's book of grammar rules. We enter as he is describing what can be found in the book):
"Each rule or principle is followed by a short hortatory essay, and usually the exhortation is followed by, or interlarded with, examples in parallel columns--the true vs. the false, the right vs. the wrong, the timid vs. the bold, the ragged vs. the trim. From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache."
This image came out of nowhere and came to life for me! I think the movement did it for me: the eyes blinking behind the steel-rimmed glasses, the nibbling lips. This passage has specific detail: not "glasses, but steel-rimmed glasses." Not "a nervous, jittery smile" but "his smile shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache." Not darting eyes, but the very active and continuous "his eyes blinking incessantly." This scene reads, not as an author standing back describing features for the reader in a list-like fashion after the fact, but as an actor stepping out fully-formed from within a rather monotonous moment to interrupt the read with the very enormity of his sudden existence.
Share a scene in a work of literature that works, & say why.
I've not heard the Lincoln/Fredrick Douglas story. For the most part I am dubious of historical works. I believe fiction is the place where the great truths of men's advancement (or decline) are told. I like to read about our shuffle to the grave through the eyes of thinkers unfettered by the constraints of dubious agendas, lost records, or secret conversations. I like well-thought out fiction that rips at the fabric of history as written by historians.
It is perhaps, also, where one might find the great truths of women's advancement. Do you mean you prefer historical fiction because it turns history into art? Into an exploration of the "who are we and why are we here" question -- into moments like Hamlet's soliloquy?
I think my favorite sort of history is primary source material. Perhaps because I get to think up my own agenda? I just love the hunt -- the discovery as I read old papers and put together my own little incomplete patchwork idea of things. Probably my next favorite is biographies and memoirs (certainly biased as well.) Then classics (a sort of primary source material for me. Example: Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. You want crazy history? Read that!)
I think part of the fun of history is exploring why the agenda is present in a document in the first place. For example, what someone insists is true is often in reaction to the reality of a moment, which didn't make it into any documents but can be inferred. I was going through court reports, letters, some journal entries, and pamphlets from Early Modern Britain several months ago. There were so many books on manners printed which outlined the rules for women: "Be good wives, be good mothers, pray this many times, do not wear this sort of skirt, do not speak in church." An historian could read those pamphlets and assume that women must have been very pious and quiet in the early modern era. Or one could conclude that there must have been a lot of women who weren't being pious and good to require all those advice manuals on how to be pious and good.
(I) think a great part of the fun is contemplating the very agenda that is present in any sort of literary work, be it creative or history. I like to contemplate the force of those agendas. People who write historical fiction are reflecting upon their own creative and subjective interpretation of the subjective analysis of limited source material. There really is no way to get a clear look at history without being there. (I think.)
I read a potentially good historical fiction once, about the captivation of Mary Rowlandson by Native Americans. The author tried to reimagine her original captivation narrative (from the 1600s) by giving her more obvious intellectual autonomy. She let us into the fictional Mary's mind. The original narrative (which I read right after the novel) is a Puritan story which was written after she was returned to New England from captivity. The narrative's audience was clearly the Puritan community, who were facing a lot of violence due to King Philip's War. The narrative strongly suggests that following God saved Mary, and that the Native Americans are evil. The clear agenda was to keep everyone strong in faith and united against the opposition.
The author of the historical fiction I read reimagined Rowlandson's captivity narrative as being propaganda published by one of the men in the community. Mary Rowlandson (in the novel) is coerced into writing it according to his rules. She doesn't love her husband in the novel, and while she's in captivity she falls in love with a Native American. During captivity, instead of praying and looking to God, she prays and thinks about female oppression and compares the more liberal Native American lifestyle for women against the Puritan lifestyle. (This while working as a slave.)
I tell you what, Memphis. I didn't know what to think. I enjoyed the read just at the story level, and I didn't mind the suggestion that Rowlandson may have been transformed by her experience, and that naturally that fact didn't make it into the history. But then, without any documentation that she was coerced by Puritan leaders to write, I wondered about the erasure of her actual story? If what she actually wanted to write was the captivity story as it stands, what are we doing three hundred years later rewriting her tale into something that makes more sense to us? We need the women of the Puritan era to have a concept of freedom that matches our own? Challenging the agenda of Rowlandson's tale either illuminates female history in America (which I like) or pretties it up for our own era, thereby diluting history (which I don't like). I've read a lot of female perspectives from the era, and they weren't (as far as I can tell) questioning things heavily. Some were certainly -- but others viewed the male-dominated structure as shielding and exactly right.
All of which I bring up only to suggest that there are shades of agenda in historical fiction, as well. This author (perhaps fairly) wanted to consider a historical woman from an alternate viewpoint -- to tell what may have happened and never made it into documented history. I appreciate that, and I question that, simultaneously.
I like well-thought out fiction that rips at the fabric of history as written by historians.
So do I! I also like well-thought out history that rips at the fabric of history as written by other historians. Ultimately the best thing to do is get in there and research it yourself, I think. Read a few different interpretations. The truth is somewhere in the middle of everything that has been written. Which may be precisely what you mean. I believe the very best historical fiction can fill in some of the interpretation without sacrificing what is documented fact. (For example, well-known dates.)
I can't compete with this sort of impenetrable analysis. I withdraw my remarks.
... 
Well said, sir. x
Thanks, Corra, for your deep insight in this post as well as the previous one.
I'm not sure it was so deep, but you're welcome!
I really appreciate your insight on these novels, Memphis. I wasn't around for the Civil Rights movement, so I don't have that memory to wear along with the read. I have read about the movement, but I've never experienced it. I can't imagine experiencing it. My mother has told me a bit about what it was like, and I've taken that information with me into my reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, knowing that it impacted that part of our history.
I love your suggestion that Atticus is even more heroic now. I completely agree with you! Though I hadn't worked that out until you mentioned it. Didn't Abraham Lincoln want to ship off the enslaved Americans to Liberia? And wasn't the change in his opinion due to a good long conversation with Frederick Douglass in the White House? I think I read that somewhere. In a lot of ways, Atticus reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. I could see Lincoln fighting for a cause based on justice and law -- even if personally he didn't quite believe it. The fact that Douglass met and impacted Lincoln's life makes me feel hopeful about Atticus.
I've just been studying the politics behind the Harlem Renaissance. There is so much complication under the surface of history. I strongly appreciate that we see that complication in Atticus now.
I do indeed love To Kill a Mockingbird. It's one of my favorite novels. I think when I read it next, the read will be even richer because of Watchman.
Cheers, Memphis!
I didn't say posting in here is unnecessary. I said I didn't understand why you needed ANOTHER place to post, that is a centralized forum divided up into sub-categories, when you could just start a thread in this group's forum, which reaches every member.:)
I was responding to this (though I concede I half-quoted a different one of your comments since it was your latest remark) -
I think it would be a mistake to return the focus of this site back to a centralized forum. This is not a social site, it is a writing site whose main purpose is to improve members writing through feedback.
This suggests to me that you feel that a central forum (a place for in-depth discussion) is unnecessary. I can't work out how you could actually believe that while making use of the central forum to voice your opinion. I think the point in this thread (not to speak for anyone) is that the social aspect of the former site was one of its many riches, in the viewpoint of several members (myself included.) Goodness, what is feedback if not conversation?
I receive the TNBW mailer, which always includes a selection of the latest discussions at the site. This suggests to me Sol also believes the discussions enrich the site -- that in fact TNBW is a social site. (How could it not be? We are all reading and writing and talking. That's... well, that's social, friend.)
What's at issue here is not whether or not we should all button up our lips and be nose to the grindstone without discussions. What's at issue is how those discussions might be organized. You're quite right: people could toss up a thread here in the Premium Group, and have done so a few times, but it's not quite the same. The threads disappear. Those looking for discussions on, for example, quality passages in published literature -- might not think to enter here, because there are abundant options for discussions now, & who knows where to start? There's no group place to file them in this Premium Group, as in the prior forum, where everything was easily accessible in a single room. You suggest that we could put up a thread in a different group, and I don't disagree with that. It's a sound way to categorize discussions. But you see (I'm not sure how this isn't abundantly obvious?), those threads are visible only to those who enter the group. And groups are limited. And ten different people could open ten different "romantic literature" groups, and their members would see only their own group's posts. No cross-sharing. So the conversations have been divided and hidden away.
You do know that arguments can happen in the smaller groups too, right? I'm not sure how that's even a valid complaint. I completely get that the arguments are annoying, but there's just really no way to have an online discussion without dealing with a few stinkers. I had a rip-roaring argument with someone here at the site once. That didn't turn out at all bad. It's called being human, butting heads, and communicating. You (I am using the universal 'you') can't just declare that the site isn't social because you don't like the negative half of a social site. That's all-or-nothing thinking and reminds me of the "I don't like Moby-Dick, let's ban it from schools" sort of philosophy which no writer approves of ever, if she values the human voice.
I don't think you or anyone here is suggesting his or her way is the only way. We're all just sharing perspectives. I also loved the social aspect of the former site, and I'd love it if someone opened up a Shred Thread here and allowed me to be an unreliable contributor. (Hint hint!) But I'd also love it if we could get a centralized forum back, which I vaguely recall Sol saying a few months ago was in the works. Since so many people missed it.
Whatever her motives, the story of a young southern woman's life Lee has told with these novels combined rivals the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for my trophy as The Great American Novel.
Memphis Trace
That is saying something. He is a favorite, yes?
I can't say that I disagree with your suggestion that Watchman was written after Mockingbird. I did notice passages in Watchman that are repeated in Mockingbird but more strategically? I don't have a copy with me, so I can't point out specifics. But I recall (for example) that some of the opening history of Maycomb appears a few chapters into Watchman and is repeated early in Mockingbird with what felt to me as a little more precision and focus. This suggests to me that Watchman (may) be an early draft?
However, I wouldn't put your suggestion past Lee.
You've reminded me I wrote about this book back in July, right after I read it. I'm not sure how I forgot I did that. I feel like it's been a year since I read Watchman, not two months! I would have simply cut and pasted this for Vern if I'd recalled I'd written it. Anyway, I seem to gesture at the same strange sense you mention: that it reads like a sequel.
Here for the ages are my thoughts fresh off the read, probably with the tears still drying on my eyelashes.
July 2015 -
I always imagined Jem & Scout would grow up to be lawyers. Probably because of the epigraph which begins To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought that Atticus would raise them to shoot straight up, like steel arrows. It turns out he did.
I tried to explain this book to a friend this morning, & I wasn't sure exactly how. I said, "It was... it was incredibly, incredibly upsetting. And yet somehow very beautiful."
Because I don't know how to exactly explain why I loved it so much, I'll begin at the beginning:
Scout is home on vacation for a few days. No one really calls her Scout anymore, except her father. He needs her to drive him places. The house is gone. Now it's an ice cream shop. A guy she grew up with wants to marry her.
This novel is not To Kill a Mockingbird. It is different. For one, many beloved characters are missing. There is no mention of Boo, & the adventures of Jem, Dill, and Scout on the front lawn of Atticus's house seem to have blown away, like so many childhood memories. Aunt Alexandra exists as a stern presence, scolding Scout for this or that unladylike infraction, but the mother figure in the Pulitzer-winning novel (Calpurnia) is altered, distant, unreachable. Scout is restless and cynical in Go Set a Watchman (not all that altered from childhood Scout). She still curses too much, shouts rather than listening, and relishes her unladylike pants. She still sits at parties & is appalled that this -- this endless chatter about babies & Maude's hat & the weather and husbands -- might be her destiny.
Fortunately, Maycomb brings back memories of the joyful childhood days which seem to be missing in Go Set a Watchman. Amid a marriage proposal and a scandalous dip in the water at Finch's Landing, Scout recalls her early days in Maycomb. Passages follow which are rich with nostalgia. Many reveal the seeds of To Kill a Mockingbird, which would be born out of Go Set a Watchman. Scout briefly recalls the famous trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, and her father's role in it. (Some editor clearly underlined this brief passage with five thousand red lines in the draft and said WRITE THIS!)
Other scenes go well beyond the few years which make up the frame of To Kill a Mockingbird, and these were especially fun to read because we see Scout, Dill, Jem, Atticus and Calpurnia beyond the walls of To Kill a Mockingbird. These scenes don't weave together neatly, the way they do in To Kill a Mockingbird. They're not directed toward a central theme: they are merely enjoyable memories. So they were fun to read, but perhaps would not have been as fun to read, if I didn't already love Scout & her friends.
There are long passages where Scout's an adult too. That's the larger story. Those passages were less rich for me, at first. They lack the detail and charm of the flashbacks, though they do have a thematic direction.
I think what made the novel really work for me in the early part was my familiarity with To Kill a Mockingbird: I craved Dill, Jem, Scout, Atticus, lemonade on the porch, Calpurnia, summers in the front yard, innocence. I craved more Atticus wisdom. Anything Atticus. I laughed out loud during one of the flashbacks, when Dill, Jem and Scout are playing revival and get caught by Atticus and the reverend. Oh, Scout! And Dill, bickering to be the one baptized! Those are the Finch adventures I remember. I loved reading those parts, thematic weave or not!
Then, about three-fourths in, we come to the shattering. Friends, I read with my jaw dropped. Horrible, cutting conversation which felt all too real. I think I've never read anything more disturbing than the chapters which begin about three-fourths in, in Go Set a Watchman. It was upsetting and excruciatingly affecting, because these are characters I love. I actually felt everything Scout feels, I think. It was in the final fifteen pages that the tears began for me, as they always do in the final pages of To Kill a Mockingbird.
As a writer, I find it interesting to contemplate the changes made from this manuscript to the final (To Kill a Mockingbird.) I find the final product subtler, more artistic, and more joyful. This one is blunt, & in places reads like a battering ram disguised as a novel. I do not object to the battering ram.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
It's interesting that in the revision of this novel (To Kill a Mockingbird) the hero is a man. What I notice, looking back on To Kill a Mockingbird, though, is that even in that novel, it was Scout, not her father, who reached for Boo Radley's hand.
This book changes & enriches To Kill a Mockingbird, because it suggests that one can be prejudiced for or against a person, without really knowing that person. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout misjudges the quiet Boo Radley. In Go Set a Watchman, we realize she has misjudged Atticus, too. In both books, the strong, strong message is: do not let your identity be so fully fixated on someone else's that you fail to see for yourself.
Chaos overtakes the novel, after the beautiful flashbacks. It goes dark, there is shouting, there is horrific truth unveiled. Aunt Alexandra's chatter about ladylike behavior, Jem's "I'm a gentleman, like Atticus." These bits start to fray, in the last three-fourths of the novel. What is a gentleman? What is a lady? Both shrink to nothing in the final scene with Calpurnia. But to be -- to be one's own watchman within all of the shouting? That was the magic of Atticus Finch. Whoever he was inside, whoever he was beneath his actions, he created an impression which has been with us for fifty years, which sowed a seed in this reader. Such an enormous seed I couldn't believe what I was reading yesterday, when that solid seed soured.
Disenchantment. Incredible frustration. How can you possibly actually be saying this? What should I believe in such a world? The chaos rising around me. The unimaginable actions of people, both beautiful & horrifically heinous. That's what Go Set a Watchman is about, through the point of view of a girl who still cannot believe what she is seeing, still must make some sense of utter innocence being shattered by the world around her -- only this time, she has nothing to cling to but herself. This time, the hero is not a silent, hard-working man with a set jaw & a pair of glasses. The hero is an awkward girl with a cigarette and a cowlick, who still curses, who doesn't know what she wants to do with her life, who loved a man in a pair of glasses with a quiet way & a newspaper, and who grew up believing that right is right, and wrong is wrong, and you stand up -- and you say it. No matter what.
When Scout screams at Atticus, "You sowed the seeds in me, Atticus!"-- I wanted to stand up and applaud, because I think that's the point in this novel. We are influenced in our childhood, for better or worse. Influenced by our heritage and culture, influenced by how others react to us, and finally (hopefully) influenced by the watchman within us. Atticus planted a watchman in Scout that even he couldn't unseat.
I find the release of this book incredibly timely. I mean, Lee gave us fifty years with the man. Fifty years to say, "Well, at least there's Atticus, though." She gave us hope. Fifty years to Scout's twenty. I feel like shaking him and screaming, "But you planted the seed in me, Atticus!"
I almost feel like, by publishing this book now, Lee is saying to all of us, "Go set a watchman. There is no Atticus, unless you make him out of yourselves. DO it." Because in a way, we are all the children of Atticus Finch, now. We are all the children of an America that we were told was good & honorable.
There is no way to end this review. I'm still reeling.
My experience with lahg ynuihj etc.
I can't follow your logic. You are disproving your own case every time you post here to say that posting here is unnecessary. The only way to prove your point is to stop talking! (That's by your own logic -- not mine!) 
corra wrote:"As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons."
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman xI waited six months for this book and then, some hours before it was supposed to be delivered to my Kindle, I read a review stating that the novel is loosely written and has no literary value, as well as revealing Atticus to be a racist, attending KKK meetings. I am boken hearted and now wonder if it is worth reading. What say you...should I read it anyway?
I answered Vern above with what I thought of the book (including a spoiler -- don't read that!) I can't tell you what you should or shouldn't read, but if you want to preserve Atticus as you currently know him? I think you'd be happier not reading it. It makes you think, but it does rather shatter the prior (final?) book. (Prior final? This is getting confusing!)
