Killing Mister Watson
by Peter Matthiessen

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Book Reviews of Killing Mister Watson

Book Review: A book worth reading twice
Summary: 5 Stars

This book reveals how difficult it is to really know the truth about a person. Written as a series of interviews with people who knew Mr. Watson, we see the man from different perspectives, but we never have a direct encounter with him..

The characters who tell their stories about Mr. Watson, make their judgments based on personal experience, hearsay, and fantastic rumors. One person's Mr. Watson is not always the same as another person's Mr. Watson. Sometimes the perspectives overlap. Sometimes they are polar opposites. Mr. Watson himself seems to deliberately project different personas depending on whom he is with.

Throughout the book Mr. Watson remains an enigma. In the end we don't know if he really was good or evil, or perhaps both. What we do know is the difficulty his neighbors have dealing the ambiguity of Mr. Watson, and how their need to resolve the ambiguity leads to the killing of Mr. Watson.

In the second volume of the trilogy, Lost Man's River, 40 years after Mr. Watson's death, we follow Mr. Watson's son, Lucius, as he tries to define his father as a fundamentally good person in the face of ambiguous evidence. In the third volume, Bone on Bone, we finally meet Mr. Watson, and we learn the events of his life that end up with his neighbors killing him on the beach.

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