Published On: 07.14.15 | 

By: Keisa Sharpe

Global reaction comes swift for ‘Go Set a Watchman’

It was expected.

Social media has been ablaze with tweets and posts about the highly anticipated literary work from Alabama native author Harper Lee, which was released today. Some book stores received fans as early as midnight.

From early Twitter stats showing how it compares with other popular books…

  To claims of domination with readers and book stores across the globe…    

  To sales pitches near and far, it will certainly be recorded as one of the most exciting “social” selling events of the year.   

Reactions span across the globe, but for Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, celebrations headline this momentous occasion.

Meanwhile, reviews for “Go Set a Watchman”, Lee’s prototype for what became the beloved “To Kill a Mockingbird,” are less than glowing. Here are some excerpts:

“Watchman” is both a painful complication of Harper Lee’s beloved book and a confirmation that a novel read widely by schoolchildren is far more bitter than sweet. … But the book’s most striking aspect— the revelation of Atticus Finch’s retrograde and, yes, frankly racist views of his black clients and neighbors — is powerful enough to subsume all the more dubious elements. The headline that Atticus Finch is a racist, someone who’s opposed to black lawyers from the NAACP or from any black participation in public spaces, alarmed many a reader. – Time magazine

“Watchman” reads as if it were fueled by the alienation a native daughter — who, like Ms. Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City — might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness.  – The New York Times

The novel goes on sale Tuesday, and everybody who loves “To Kill a Mockingbird” is going to read it, no matter what I or any other reviewer says about its literary quality, the bizarre transformation of Atticus or its odd provenance. All I know for certain is that “Go Set a Watchman” is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece. – Maureen Corrigan, NPR

A few passages exactly overlap between the two books, principally scene-setters describing Maycomb, Alabamian history and local folklore such as the comical legal consequences of the intermarriage of the Cunningham and Coningham clans. A handful of paragraphs alluding to the Robinson rape case in the 1930s (though with one crucial detail changed) were expanded to hundreds of pages in To Kill a Mockingbird. Encountering these seed sentences, it is hard not to feel some awe at the literary midwives who spotted, in the original conception, the greater literary sibling that existed in embryo. If the text now published had been the one released in 1960, it would almost certainly not have achieved the same greatness. – The Guardian

According to numerous accounts, “Go Set a Watchman” is the earliest version of the manuscript that became “To Kill a Mockingbird,” acquired by Lippincott in 1957 and subjected, under the guidance of editor Tay Hohoff, to what Smithsonian Magazine once called “a title-on-down revision.” What does this mean for us as readers? That we can’t help but engage with “Go Set a Watchman” through a filter of comparison. – Los Angeles Times

“Watchman” is compelling in its timeliness. During the historical moment in which the novel takes place, in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, legislators had begun to authorize the raising of the Confederate flag over the statehouse or the incorporation of it into the design of state flags as a reaction and opposition to the Supreme Court’s (Brown v. Board of Education) decision — thus inscribing the kind of white Southern anxiety dramatized in Lee’s novel. – The Washington Post

 

 

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