Rujuta picked this book as part of her list of books to read in her ninth grade. I hadn’t read it before and, as a result, I too read it with her.
We’d read it just like the protagonist, Atticus, would read it with his daughter, Scout, but with a small change: Rujuta too read it to me. For a while now we have our homeschool conversation sessions (I hesitate calling them “classes”) done remotely. But that does not deter us from communicating effectively and joyfully. I wish sometimes that I were where she is, but I solemnly accept it like a serenity prayer practitioner would.
This is not a review of the book. Just a spontaneous (I just finished the book) reaction. This is a story about the drama that takes place in a fictional town of the “deep south” state of Alabama in the United States. It tells us about a white man’s struggle against a deeply racist white society. Harper Lee has masterfully narrated it and I have admired her no-fluff, rational writing a lot. She uses words that have connotations from a postwar, post-depression era of the second half of the twentieth century. That takes some getting used to, but once the reader does that, the true nature of the novel is slowly revealed.
Some modern interpretations make this anti-racist novel, somewhat surprisingly, a racist book. One reason for it might be that the protagonist is a white man who gives the appearance of a savior. Such an interpretation may have enough backing, but I didn’t think it was racist simply because it did not occur to me that the author committed the error of premature generalization — deriving a conclusion about a group from a few individuals’ behaviors. So, for me, it is not a racist novel. The book, for some reason, turned out controversial at least in the first couple of decades after it first came out.
Of course the protagonist is an idealist. I’d compare him with a saint rather than a human being. His ideals are perhaps too much to take for many of us especially in a society whose values are strongly influenced by materialism, conformity, and stability because of one’s positional strength.
Many a time, I wept and sobbed as I reflected on Lee’s words; perhaps because the story was gripping, the drama felt real, and sentiments overflowed. I visualized the situation in that small town of many characters and their value systems. I am born and brought up in a completely different world, but I could still understand and appreciate it because, you know, although human behavior has changed, human nature has changed very little.
Most of all, there were so many moments when I felt that the power of love trumps the love of power. It reminded me of Charles Bukowski:
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
It is a gem of a novel.
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