Beyond the Letters

Imagine a little town in American South. A town, which is carefully covered from the bright sunlight by the branches of ancient oaks, a town where every garden is decorated with azaleas, camellias and roses, where all people know each other and secrets are impossible to keep for more than two days. All the inhabitants here are very different, with unique fancies and skeletons in the cupboards, they have their own social ladder as well as social divisions but the life seems to go on quietly and peacefully. And it looks like nothing important can happen in this place… but precisely here, in Maycomb, Alabama, Harper Lee set her acclaimed novel. Adult world in the eyes of a child “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a little trip to the land of childhood. Of a childhood sunny and warm, with lemonade on a hot day, with secrets behind the high fence of the Radley’s place, with Miss Maudie’s colourful garden and Mrs. Dubose’s endless moralizing. The novel is narrated by Jean Louise Finch (o...

"And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the East of Eden" There is so much about this book that it is really hard to find appropriate words to speak about it. This is one of those books which make you live through a whole new life while you are reading it. Three generations of people, fifty five years and hundreds of events appear before your eyes, evil and good, virtue and vice, love and hatred, happiness and sadness - there is everything life can bring to you and having read the novel you feel that whatever it brings it is wonderful and worth living. Though the places and people described in the book are all very different, East of Eden deals mostly with the life of small town America. Steinbeck doesn't idealize this life, he shows both sides of it - religious meetings and brothels, poor farmers and rich businessmen, conservative people and those who are not afraid to look into the future. All this gives a very good and d...