“Las velas son varitas mágicas; cuando enciendes una el mundo se vuelve un libro de cuentos.”

Back in July, a couple of bloggers I follow (Ali at Heaven Ali and Lizzi at These Little Words) were reading Truman Capote’s A Capote Reader. I didn’t want to commit to reading such a big volume, but their posts did pique my interest in Capote’s short stories, hence my purchase of The Complete Stories.

This collection consists of twenty stories written between 1943 and 1982, presented in chronological order. I’m not going to try to review each story in turn, but to give a sense of the themes and a little of what I thought of the collection as a whole.

The settings for Capote’s stories seem to fall into two main camps. Firstly, we have the stories set in the Deep South. A few of these tales feature mysterious, almost fable-like characters – in some instances a strange individual who seems to possess some unfathomable insight or supernatural power over others. In Jug of Silver, for example, a drug-store owner looks to revive interest in his flagging business with a competition to guess the total value of all the nickels and dimes stuffed into a large glass jug. The more money customers spend in the shop, the more opportunities they gain to guess the amount. When a curious boy named Appleseed arrives out of the blue exclaiming that he will count the money by sight, no one believes he can do it…

New York provides the setting for the remaining stories, and these city-based tales mostly feature lonely individuals or couples trapped in failing relationships. The situations are not straightforward, and Capote’s characters tend to be vulnerable, isolated or unhappy with the cards that life has dealt them. In Master Misery, one of my favourites from the collection, we meet Sylvia, a young woman who is clearly irritated to be living with her childhood friend Estelle and her husband:

It occurred to her then that she might walk home through the park: an act of defiance almost, for Henry and Estelle, always insistent upon their city wisdom, had said over and again, Sylvia, you have no idea how dangerous it is, walking in the park after dark; look what happened to Myrtle Calisher. This isn’t Easton, honey. That was the other thing they said. And said. God, she was sick of it. Still, and aside from a few other typists at SnugFare, an underwear company for which she worked, who else in New York did she know? Oh, it would be all right if only she did not have to live with them, if she could afford somewhere a small room of her own; but there in that chintz-cramped apartment she sometimes felt she would choke them both. (pgs 155-156, Penguin Classics)

I love that quote: Sylvia’s anger at her situation, Estelle’s patronising tone. It conveys so much about the characters and their position.

The Master Misery of the title is Mr. Revercomb, a man who buys dreams for money, stealing a tiny piece of an individual’s identity with every story. Sylvia starts selling her dreams, but as the story progresses she becomes increasingly unsettled, ultimately realising that she must reclaim what’s rightfully hers.

In Miriam, another disquieting story, a lonely woman in her sixties befriends a young girl, Miriam, on a trip to the cinema. But when Miriam arrives at the woman’s apartment expecting to move in, events take a more sinister turn.

To read the rest of my review, please click here:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2015...

"...of all things this was saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one's lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn't." (171)

I was already familiar with a couple of these stories (they were included in an edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's that I read earlier), but I've long wanted to read the complete collection. So, when my girlfriend told me the other day that she had started reading it, and asked me if I wanted to join her, my answer was an enthusiastic yes. My opinion of them all is akin to that of the few I had previously read: even if I don't always love the content of the stories, they are invariably beautifully constructed and impeccably told. And some of them I do truly love.

Beautiful and haunting. A Christmas Memory never fails to bring a tear. Also, realized I'd read A Thanksgiving Visitor as a very young person and didn't get what Truman was referencing when his bully attacted him for being a "sissy." Heart-breaking to consider what it must have been like to be a young gay boy in a small town in the 1930s.

I decided to read this complete collection of Capote’s short stories, but wasn’t very much impressed. I had quite high expectations of Truman Capote’s writing style because Breakfast at Tiffany’s was such a great story. Unfortunately, I had such a difficult time to persist in reading this book but eventually gave up halfway through it. Most short stories were dull and didn’t succeed in keeping my attention and/or creating a bond with the characters. However, the short stories I did enjoy to read were nicely written and their open endings left me thinking for a good amount of time which is always a good thing.

Определено не ни се получи разговорът с Труман. Не успях да се въвлека в историите, които иначе бяха поне относително четивни. Към края, където последните няколко разказа ми харесаха повече, не бях сигурен дали нещо в стила се е променило, в начина на разказване, в самите истории, или аз просто съм свикнал с начина на писане на автора...

4.5**

tbh everytime i read short stories my brain stops functioning but i loved these!!!

favs: a christmas memory
children on their birthdays
& jug of silver

I don't know whether to give this more stars for the quality of writing, but it brings into focus such unpleasant things, it is hard to say I "really LIKED it." Which of course is part of the brilliance of his writing.
Really fun as a book club pick...lots of short stories, each one of them giving you something to talk about. Wasn't particularly taken with the first half of the book, but fell in love with some of the later stories, and found all of the stories a nice complement to each other when taken as a whole. This was my first introduction to Capote, and I was impressed with his astute observation of human nature and his ability to capture and lay raw some of the ugly underbelly of thoughts that we all uncomfortably find a bit too familiar. I particularly was impressed with "Master Misery," which is about someone who sells their dreams to a mysterious person who buys people's dreams.
(two people speaking of other people who sell their dreams as well):
"Eaten up, all of 'em, never saw a bunch of sharks, worse than actors or clowns (the former profession of the speaker) or businessmen. Crazy if you think about it: you worry whether you're going to sleep, if you're going to have a dream, if you're going to remember the dream. Round and round. So you get a couple of bucks, so you rush to the nearest liquor store- or the nearest sleeping-pill machine. And first thing you know, you're roaming your way up outhouse alley. Why, baby, you know what it's like? It's just like life.
"No, Oreilly, that's what it isn't like. It hasn't anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone. Oreilly, I tell you I haven't an ambition, and there used to be so much. I don't understand it and I don't know what to do."
He grinned. "And you say it isn't like life? Who understands life and who knows what to do?"

I was also impressed with the tenderness and capturing of some of the most beautiful bits of humanity in "A Christmas Memory," "The Thanksgiving Visitor" and "One Christmas." The first two are ones I would like to read with my older child.

*I skipped three of the stories - the holiday pieces - until winter when I'm in the mood*

For some reason I thought all of the stories would be about glitterati and their fancy things. Some are, but there was also a very satisying offering of Southern Gothic magic. 'Children On Their Birthdays' and 'A Diamond Guitar' were especially moving.

One rant: In the first two paragraphs of 'The Bargain', I was convinced that I was rereading 'A Mink of One's Own'. Was the idea of two hoity toity ladies meeting to buy/sell mink coats so common a practice in Capote's time that no one batted an eye when he wrote two stories built on that scene?! I'm certain that if a writer today were to publish a story involving an identical situation to one of his earlier works, he'd be looked down upon. Reynolds Price spends much of the introduction to this volume basically trashing Capote and he never mentions this coincidence. I also couldn't find any nod to it online. Just a thought.

Oh, and my birthday is in September and if anyone were ever inclined to buy me clothes as a gift, Capote's ensemble on the cover provides an excellent guide. Especially the hat.

N-ai ce să scrii despre Capote și să speri că n-a mai fost scris!

Poți, eventual, să afirmi - ca să epatezi - că nu-l guști. Dar asta ar friza prostia. Capote este impecabil (în tot ce am citit eu din el). Prozele acestei culegeri sunt impecabil șlefuite. Mici lumi, mari suferințe, întâmplări triste, vesele, rememorări nostalgice, stupide, prinse în chihlimbar.

The nearly apopletic horror of Flannery O'Connor's first view of Truman Capote, on the book jacket of OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS—with the author lying recumbent on a couch and looking, according to one wag, like a cherubic rent boy—is well known. Nor did she much care for one of Capote's comrades in arms, Georgian Carson McCullers, who was an alcoholic-in-training starting in adolescence, a lesbian, and for most of her life a partial paralytic, owing to a succession of small strokes. Nevertheless, it's interesting that O'Connor, whose best-known saying is probably that the number of freaks in Southern literature (both her own and others) was due to the fact that Southerners could still identify the breed when they saw them, couldn't find more interest in and sympathy for art created by freaks and misfits who wrote about their type. Capote and McCullers, after all, limned characters of the sort who fascinated O'Connor: murderers, giants.

Perhaps her particular dislike of Capote had something to do with how dazzlingly he was greeted by what then passed for the New York glitterati, who were fascinated by this seeming avatar of Southern exotica (if not downright decadence). Another photo of the young Capote in his early metropolitan days adorns the COMPLETE STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE, with the boy-writer emerging from a canopy of the most salacious elephant ears ever seen. The book is not large, containing only 20 works: among them are the wondrous Thanksgiving and Christmas stories, which have served as the basis of several films, and also "Children on their Birthdays," a heart-wringer unsurpassed in its small-town pathos and dreams of glamour beyond. Its protagonist here could be a Lulamae Barnes who never made it out of Alabama, and who thus never became a Holly Golightly. At best, she found the gloves and a hat at a second-hand sale.

There are some surprises and puzzlements here, even for the most die-hard Capote-phile. It's difficult to tell, for example, if some of the early stories are based upon his cruelly feckless mother—who indeed made it out of Alabama, heading first to New Orleans and then to New York City with a new husband, the Cuban Joe Capote, who adopted her young son—or the younger Capote's lifelong infatuation with Society, whose poisonous bloom opened slenderly into the "Le Côte Basque" chapter of ANSWERED PRAYERS, the work which cost him nearly all his friends. Capote wanted to be Proust, a chronicler of the upper classes in drawing rooms, at table, and, as reported, in bed. But the stories sound much more like Salinger, with perhaps a bit of Cheever thrown in. Not that the stories are bad; in fact, there's nothing here that won't cure a case of the "mean reds," or at least lend them some startling new hues.

Truman Capote es uno de mis escritores favoritos, no conocía la mayoría de estos cuentos y me encantó poder conocer otro angulo de la escritura de Truman. Creo que en la medida que leí las historias fui dejando un comentario por ende no tengo mucho que agregar, además, no creo que haga un resumen porque recomiendo leer los cuentos y se pueden encontrar por separado en la web.

Ya había leído "Las paredes están frías" pero en esta ocasión tiene un matiz diferente y no he dejado de darle vueltas al cuento. Creo que lo estoy pensando demasiado.

Un visón propio es un cuento corto pero me hizo ahondar en lo desconocidos que somos para nosotros mismos y para los demás.

"La forma de las cosas" es un cuento en el que nada es lo que parece y que al lector logra hacerlo enfrentarse con esos juicios a priori, además de mostrar las secuelas de la guerra.

"La Botella de Plata" es un cuento hermoso. Directo al corazón.

"Miriam" Hace mucho tiempo había leído esta historia y me había dejado con dudas sobre la explicación de quién es la niña y su relación con la señora.

"Mi versión del asunto."

La Leyenda de Preacher me pareció tan bonita y divertida.

Un árbol de noche. Que miedo me daba esta pareja tan extraña y estrafalaria. Me sentí identificado con Kay.

"El Halcón Decapitado"

"Cierra la última puerta"

"Niños En Su Cumpleaños" es uno de los cuentos que más me han gustado de principio a fin. La pérdida de la inocencia, la quietud del pueblo y ese personaje de diez años que es Miss Bobbit.

Profesor Miseria se ha convertido en uno de mis cuentos favoritos.

"La Ganga" Este cuento me recordó el cuento "Un visón propio"

"Una guitarra de diamantes" Me ha parecido el cuento más bonito y triste a la vez.

"Una Casa de Flores" es un cuento de tantos contrastes y me hizo reír. Es un cuento muy lindo y es genial ver tantas facetas de un escritor, estoy impresionado por estos cuentos tan diversos.

"Un Recuerdo de Navidad" Lloré con este cuento porque es hermoso. Odio la navidad y aún así es el mejor cuento de navidad que he leído.

"En la antesala del paraíso"

"El Invitado del día de Acción de gracias" Este cuento es narrado por el mismo personaje de "Un recuerdo navideño" así que volví a llorar porque tiene los personajes más bonitos del mundo. Miss Sook me hace arrugar el corazón y quisiera leer una novela donde ella aparezca. Amo de manera desmesurada este narrador y estos personajes.

"Mojave" Este cuento estuvo bien y entretenido.

"Una Navidad" En esta historia tenemos a un narrador que ya aparecía anteriormente y aunque no aparece mucho mi personaje favorito, si que lo hace y me encantó."