Sunday Review: Harper Lee’s two novels

Some thoughts

By William Silveira

Publishing is a field of endeavor that is suffering from lack of readers. But HarperCollins Publishers has managed to pull profits not only from a book that was published 50 years ago, but also from another book, written by the same author (and initially rejected by publishers), that preceded the book published 50 years ago.

Sunday Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

The book and its movie

By Morris Dean

In Chapter 10 of what was until recently Harper Lee’s only novel (1960), Atticus Finch tells his 12-year-old son Jem that “it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” and the seriousness of this injunction is emphasized by the next sentence:

A trope for life and death

It's hard to give the ExtraOrdinary (EO) rating to a movie that continually reminds the viewer of the suffering of life and the finality of death, but impossible not to give it to Charlie Kaufman's utterly fascinating, gripping 2008 film, "Synecdoche, New York."
    It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener, who played opposite Hoffman in "Capote." (Hoffman won the Oscar for his performance as Truman Capote in that film, and Keener portrayed Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. By the way, tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the murder of the Clutter family, the subject of Capote's nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.)
    A trope is a word or expression used in a figurative sense, and a synecdoche is a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole. I like the nice ambiguity of the movie's title. Is Synecdoche a town in New York (like Poughkeepsie, New York), or does the title identify New York appositively as a synecdoche for the movie's subject (life and death, as I would say)?
    The movie ends abruptly with the Hoffman character's being given the stage direction, "Die," and the screen's turning white. I couldn't fail to notice the striking coincidence of watching this film (about which I knew nothing) on the day I'd posted "Unsettled question," focusing as that post does on the finality of death.
    Even a detailed plot summary can't convey the sense of this film. It has to be experienced.

Charlie Kaufman's film credits include "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), "Adaptation" (2002), "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), and "Being John Malkovich" (1999). Also a film I haven't seen, "Human Nature" (2001).