Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Never love a wild thing” In a bar in NYC in 1956, the anonymous narrator (a writer) sees a photo of a “primitive” African sculpture depicting a woman who can only be Holly Golightly. Had she really been to Africa? What was she doing now? Where was she? Was she dead, crazy, or married? The narrator then remembers and tells the story of when, back in the autumn of 1943 during WWII, he moved into the Upper East Side brownstone apartment above Holly’s and, while trying to become a published writer, became friends with her and learned her personality and past and loved her and lost her. Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is therefore a nostalgic novella painting a portrait of NYC in the early 1940s and especially of the small-town Texas child-bride turned “café society celebrity and girl about NY.” Holly is “two months shy of nineteen” when the narrator first meets her. Her business card says her occupation is “traveling,” and her apartment always looks like it’s just been moved into. She doesn’t like zoos with all their caged wild animals. She carries herself with a self-amused attitude, calls people “Darling,” and sprinkles her conversation with French words, like “Not un peu bit.” She smokes and drinks. Her varicolored blond hair (cut like a boy’s) and green eyes light up the air around her. She’s elegantly thin, healthy, and clean. What does she do for money? Go out with men who pay for her entertainment and give her nice gifts. She sometimes sleeps with them in her apartment, but also says, “I’ve only had eleven lovers—does that make me a whore?” According to O J Berman, the Hollywood agent who took Holly under his wing when she tried to but gave up becoming a movie star, she’s a phony, but a real phony, because she believes all the fictions she fabricates. Whatever she pretends or believes, Holly wants to stay true to herself and wants to find a place where she belongs, a real-life place that makes her feel like breakfast at Tiffany’s (where she goes when the “mean reds” hit her). “Be anything but a coward,” she says. The movie with Audrey Hepburn as Holly (apparently Capote wanted Marylin Monroe to play the role) generally follows the spirit and action of the novella, with some exceptions. The novella’s ending is more poignant, sad, and somehow hopeful than the corny, unconvincing movie ending. There is no romance between Holly and the narrator in the novella, much though the narrator would have wished there to have been. George Pepard is miscast as the narrator in the movie, while Mickey Rooney’s playing a Japanese American (with buck teeth, accented English, and hysterical behavior) must be a landmark in offensive Asian stereotyping, while his character’s role in the novella, the professional photographer Mr. Yunioshi, is much more benign and underplayed. Capote writes vivid descriptions (e.g., “Rusty’s raw baby buttocks face” or “She gleamed like a transparent child”) and funny lines (e.g., “I like a man who sees the humor [during sex]. Most of them are all pant and puff”). There is Capote’s self-deprecating take down of aspiring “serious” writers: “I’ve never been to bed with a writer. Are you a real writer? Does anyone buy what you write?” But although there is plenty of NYC in the story—e.g., Central Park, the Frick Museum, Sing Sing prison, some street and shop names, the city lights, etc.—Holly dominates. If you like well-written character studies about independent, strong, witty women who know how to use men to get what they want but who always seem lonely, unlucky, and sad, especially such stories set in NYC in the 1940s, and if you don’t mind some dated details, including some insulting references to homosexuality and race, you’d probably like the story. It isn’t as norm-challenging as it seemed in the late 1950s and early 60s, but it is entertaining and moving. Audiobook reader Michael C. Hall gives a professional performance without overdoing it. View all my reviews
0 Comments
|
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University