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Rating: If beyond the hedge there's darkness, within Harper Lee's little garden lies a masterpiece.
In a time where hedges, walls, and seas are springing up by the hundreds, reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960) can only help to understand and comprehend the unknown fruit of prejudice; it can help to break down, or at least chip at, the barriers in our consciences that are slowly being reinforced by the tragic news that every day is thrust in our faces by the mass media, barriers that become moats, filled with crocodiles, thanks to shortsighted policies and very ignorant politicians.
The hedge that divided the world of young Finch siblings (Scout, the protagonist who tells the story in the first person, and Jem, the older brother) from the Radley’s garden was an impassable boundary built on the fear of the unknown, excellently represented in the figure of Boo, the son secluded at home, perhaps insane and with inhuman features for the two children, always accompanied in their summer adventures by the faithful friend Dill. But the higher you look from those few streets of the little neighborhood of that 1930s Alabama village during the "Great Depression," the thicker and more imposing the hedges become. They divide people, the whites here and the blacks there, and there is nothing that wonderful figure of lawyer Atticus Finch, who vainly tries to save from an unjust conviction Tom Robinson, a poor “negro” accused of assaulting a young white woman, can do. Atticus hovers on the brink of literary perfection, a widower father who allows for the individuality of his children, upright in any family or social situation, “negrophile” for his racism-laden fellow citizens, too normal and "flat" for the expectations of his children. The maternal figure is covered by Calpurnia, the all-purpose black maid, as rigid and inflexible as she is sweet and independent. The 1961 Pulitzer Prize masterfully moves the characters of the story, elevating the narration to a manifesto for the civil rights movement in favor of African Americans who, in the early 1960s, shouted to the world for the end of segregation and racial discrimination.
A brilliant work from the first to the last page, a cornerstone of 20th-century US literature, written simply and masterfully, perfect to read at any age, recommended to adolescents in the formative phase and well-formed adult blockheads.
Killing a defenseless little bird is a sin, it is pure violence to be condemned and opposed. There are more and more little birds around, and they are increasingly weak under the fire of conscienceless hunters. And the hunting season seems to never end...
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