Таке щось.

I really didn't understand this. I wanted to like it. The characters were well-drawn and interesting, but I couldn't really figure out what was going on. I was especially puzzled about happened to Joel at the end (Part 3).

This book had some beautiful language, and I appreciated how it honored fantasy as a form of queer survival & way of coming into ones own self. However, it did this at the expense of characters that were heavily stereotyped in racist & ableist ways. Capote bitch get your act together! She needs to do some work..

"Други гласове, други стаи" е първата ми прочетена книга на Капоти и не е нужно да съм прочел и следващите му (това неминуемо ще се случи), за да мога убедено да твърдя, че е блестящ писател. Още от млад Труман е овладял вплитането на нишките на мъката, неизвестността, неосъществимостта и копнежа по миналото в прекрасната си проза. Радостта в романа е малко, а щастието е неизвестното в уравнението - Джоел Нокс е твърде малък, за да го открие сам, а грижещите се за него са твърде отчаяни, за да го търсят повече.

Книгата носи аромат на жега, юг, кристално чисто небе и носталгия по неслучилото се. Слънцето сякаш топи всички мечти, а горещото настояще задушава и малкото красиви спомени. За 13-годишния Джоел все пак има шанс да успее да си проправи път през миражите, но се налага да премине през емоционалния разпад на околните му, както и през заблудите на собственото си съзряване.

Да четеш "Други гласове, други стаи" е като да слушаш китара или като да наблюдаваш как "дъждовните капки се съгласуват, за да следват общ ритъм".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVRxd...

4.5 stars

What an amazing book …

Joel Harrison Knox is moving to his father’s house in the rural South after the death of his mother … in the small town of Noon City and Skully’s Landing, his father’s estate, Joel encounters several eccentric characters, such as Cousin Randolph, Zoo Fever, and Idabel Thompkins … all of whom have an enormous impact on Joel’s identity and sense of isolation and acceptance …

This is the fourth Truman Capote book that I have read, and I am more and more enthralled with his lyrical descriptions of the physical landscape and psychological landscape in which his characters reside … this book ends with a thirty page stream of consciousness as Joel recovers from a breakdown … some of the best writing I’ve ever read in my lifetime …

I wish I had the literary sophistication to describe the beauty and intensity of this book … I fell in love with all of the characters in this book, their incredible vulnerability, their liveliness and their flaws … I fell in love with the flora of the Deep South - the scents of the overgrown and neglected gardens of Skully’s Landing, the rilling creeks and dense jungle of the surroundings …

A must read for everyone …

You think you're in "To Kill A Mockingbird" but suddenly there's a Blanche Dubois hiding upstairs and the backstory brings everything to life:

"Now set in the center of this table was a little photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a humorous backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked familiar, too ...

"Before it happened," said Randolph, resuming his seat, "before then, Ed was very different... very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for one thing, his owning Pepe, or being, that is, his manager, complicated our relations. Pepe Alvarez, he is the one with the straw hat, and the girl, well, that is Dolores.

...

"Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject? When one is your age most subtleties go unobserved; even so, I imagine you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now, that I should've had ever the innocence to feel such love; nevertheless, when I was twenty-three...

"It is the girl in the picture, Dolores. And we met in Madrid. But she was not Spanish; at least I do not believe so, though actually I never knew precisely where she came from: her English was quite perfect. As for me, I had been in Europe then two years, living, as it were, and for the most part, in museums: I wonder really whether anyone ever copied so many Masters? There was almost no painting of which I could not do a most engaging facsimile... still, when it came to something of my own, I went quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all.

"Dolores, on the other hand, was one of those from whom such as I manage occasionally to borrow energy: always with her I knew very much that I was alive, and came finally to believe in my own validity: for the first time I saw things without distortion and complete. That fall we went to Paris, and then to Cuba, where we lived high above the bay of Matanzas in a house... how should I describe it?... it was cloud-pink stone with rooms strewn like gold and white flowers on a vine of high corridors and crumbling blue steps; with the windows wide and the wind moving through, it was like an island, cool and most silent. She was like a child there, and sweet as an orange is sweet, and lazy, deliciously lazy; she liked to sit naked in the sun, and draw tiny little animals, toads and bees and chipmunks, and read astrology magazines, and chart the stars, and wash her hair (this she did no less than three times a day); she was a gambler, too, and every afternoon we went down to the village and bought lottery tickets, or a new guitar: she had over thirty guitars, and played all of them, I must admit, quite horridly.

...

"Then one afternoon, walking home from the market and carrying, if you please, a fine live hen, I saw her talking with a man there in the shade by the cathedral; there was an intimacy in their attitude which made me still inside: this I knew was no simple tourist asking direction, and later, when I told her what I'd seen, she said, oh, very casually, yes, it was a friend, someone she'd met in a cafй, a prizefighter: would I care to meet him?

"Now after an injury, physical, spiritual, whatever, one always believes had one obeyed a premonition (there is usually in such instances an imagined premonition) nothing would have happened; still, had I had absolute foreknowledge, I should have gone right ahead, for in every lifetime there occur situations when one is no more than a thread in a design willfully woven by... who should I say? God?

"It was one Sunday that they came, the prizefighter, Pepe Alvarez, and Ed Sansom, his manager. A mercilessly hot day, as I recall, and we sat in the patio with fans and cold drinks: you could scarcely select a group with less in common than we four; had it not been for Sansom, who was something of a buffoon and therefore distracting, it would all have been rather too tense, for one couldn't ignore the not very discreet interplay between Dolores and the young Mexican: they were lovers, ... and I was not surprised: Pepe was so extraordinary: his face was alive, yet dreamlike, brutal, yet boyish, foreign but familiar (as something from childhood is familiar), both shy and aggressive, both sleeping and awake. But when I say he and Dolores were lovers, perhaps I exaggerate: lovers implies, to some extent, reciprocity, and Dolores, as became apparent, could never love anyone, so caught was she within a trance; then, too, other than that they performed a pleasurable function, she had no personal feeling or respect for men or the masculine personality... that personality which, despite legend, can only be most sensitively appreciated by its own kind. As it was getting dark in the patio, I looked at Pepe: his Indian skin seemed to hold all the light left in the air, his flat animal-shrewd eyes, bright as though with tears, regarded Dolores exclusively; and suddenly, with a mild shock, I realized it was not she of whom I was jealous, but him.

"Afterwards, and though at first I was careful not to show the quality of my feelings, Dolores understood intuitively what had happened: 'Strange how long it takes us to discover ourselves; I've known since first I saw you, she said, adding, 'I do not think, though, that he is the one for you; I've known too many Pepes: love him if you will, it will come to nothing.' The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

"It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier. But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart. There were moments, wonderful moments, when I thought I was free, that I could forget him and that sleepy violent face, but then he would not let me, no, he was always there, sitting in the patio, or listening to her play the guitar, laughing, talking, near but remote, always there, as I was in Dolores' dreams. I could not endure to see him suffer; it was an agony to watch him fight, prancing quick and cruel, see him hit, the glare, the blood and the blueness. I gave him money, bought him cream-colored hats, gold bracelets (which he adored, and wore like a woman), shoes in bright Negro colors, candy silk shirts, and I gave all these things to Ed Sansom, too: how they despised me, both of them, but not enough to refuse a gift, oh never. And Dolores continued with Pepe in her queer compulsive way, not really interested one way or another, not caring whether he stayed or went; like some brainless plant, she lived (existed) beyond her own control in that reckless book of dreams. She could not help me. What we most want is only to be held... and told... that everything (everything is a funny thing, is baby milk and Papa's eyes, is roaring logs on a cold morning, is hoot-owls and the boy who makes you cry after school, is Mama's long hair, is being afraid and twisted faces on the bedroom wall)... everything is going to be all right.

"One night Pepe came to the house very drunk, and proceeded with the boldest abandon to a) beat Dolores with his belt, b) piss on the rug and on my paintings, c) call me horrible hurting names, d) break my nose, e) and f) and otherwise. And I walked in the streets that night, and along the docks, and talked aloud pleading with myself to go away, be alone again, I said, as if I were not alone, rent another room in another life. I sat in Jackson Square; except for the tolling of train bells, it was quiet and all the Cabildo was like a haunted palace; there was a blond misty boy sitting beside me, and he looked at me, and I at him, and we were not strangers: our hands moved towards each other to embrace. I never heard his voice, for we did not speak; it is a shame, I should so like the memory of it. Loneliness, like fever, thrives on night, but there with him light broke, breaking in the trees like birdsong, and when sunrise came, he loosened his fingers from mine, and walked away, that misty boy, my friend.

"Always now we were together, Dolores, Pepe, Ed and I, Ed and his jokes, we other three and our silences. Grotesque quadruplets (born of what fantastic parent?) we fed upon one another, as cancer feeds upon itself, and yet, will you believe this? there are a medley of moments I remember with the kind of nostalgia reserved usually for sweeter things: Pepe (I see) is lighting a match with his thumb nail, is trying with a bare hand to snatch a goldfish from the fountain, we are at a picture-show eating popcorn from the same bag, he has fallen asleep and leans against my shoulder, he is laughing because I wince at a boxing-cut on his lip. I hear him whistling on the stairs, I hear him mounting toward me and his footsteps are not so loud as my heart. Days, fast fading as snowflakes, flurry into autumn, fall all around like November leaves, the sky, cold red with winter, frightens with the light it sheds: I sleep all day, the shutters closed, the covers drawn above my eyes. Now it is Mardi Gras, and we are going to a ball; everyone has chosen his costume but me: Ed is a Franciscan monk (gnawing a cigar), Pepe is a bandit and Dolores a ballerina; but I cannot think what to wear and this becomes a dilemma of disproportionate importance. Dolores appears the night of the ball with a tremendous pink box: transformed, I am a Countess and my king is Louis XVI; I have silver hair and satin slippers, a green mask, am wrapped in silk pistachio and pink: at first, before the mirror, this horrifies me, then pleases to rapture, for I am very beautiful, and later, when the waltz begins, Pepe, who does not know, begs a dance, and I, oh sly Cinderella, smile beneath my mask, thinking: Ah, if I were really me! Toad into prince, tin into gold; fly, feathered serpent, the hour grows old; so ends a part of my saga.

"Another spring, and they were gone; it was April, the sixth of that rainy lilac April, just two days after our happy trip to Pontchartrain... where the picture was taken, and where, in symbolic dark, we'd drifted through the tunnel of love. All right, listen: late that afternoon when I woke up rain was at the window and on the roof: a kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode. Below a radio talked and sang, yet I knew no one heard it: she was gone, and Pepe with her.

...

"Didn't you ever even try to find out where they got off to?"

"Over there," said Randolph with a tired smile, "is a five-pound volume listing every town and hamlet on the globe; it is what I believe in, this almanac: day by day I've gone through it writing Pepe always in care of the postmaster; just notes, nothing but my name and what we will for convenience call address. Oh, I know that I shall never have an answer. But it gives me something to believe in. And that is peace."

Downstairs the supper bell sounded. Randolph did not move. His face seemed to contract with a look of sad guilt. "I've been very weak this afternoon, very wicked," he said, rising for Joel to accept an invitation of open arms. "Do forgive me, darling Joel." Then, in a voice as urgent as the bell, he added: "And please, tell me what I want to hear."

Joel remembered. "Everything," he said gently, "everything is going to be all right."

170-ish pages of beautiful, boring sentences.

Sjajan debitantski roman mladog Trumana Kapotea. Knjiga zbog koje, tokom čitanja, shvatim zašto volim književnost. Ovaj roman bi najbolje mogli opisati kao mesto susreta romana „Kako ubiti pticu rugalicu“, „Sto godina samoće“ i filma „Arizona Dream". Više o samoj knjizi možete pročitati u posebnom tekstu na ovom linku: http://www.bookvar.rs/drugi-glasovi-d...

Truman Capote's first published novel, under contract to Bennett Cerf at Random House, was this OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS (1948). Capote had already had some success as a short-story writer, and the novel is fairly accomplished for an otherwise young author.

Essentially it's a mixture of allegory, message and Southern Gothick. (Spoilers will follow): The allegory is most easily seen in following young Joel Knox from the unnamed big city (which could be nothing but New Orleans) to the hinterland, passing through "Noon City" and then to the old rundown family estate at "Skully's Landing." Joel makes friends with mixed-race neighbors (some of whom may be relatives), gets to know a transvestite relative, and is puzzled by a mysterious lady who appears from an upstairs window. Now I'll do something I rarely do, quote someone briefly, because Gerald Clarke in his 1988 bio CAPOTE said it so well. Again, skip it if you dislike spoilers:

"Finally, Joel accepts his destiny, which is to be homosexual, to always hear other voices and live in other rooms. Yet acceptance is not a surrender; it is a liberation. "I am me," he whoops. "I am Joel, we are the same people."

It is worth noting that during the exact period as Capote, Gore Vidal was writing and publishing his own debut novel, THE CITY AND THE PILLAR (1948). Like Vidal's confessional work, Capote's novel is hardly carefree (Holly Golightly lay ten years in the future) but OTHER VOICES is engrossing, insightful, and speaks volumes about the author's concerns and his own sexual identity. I recommend OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS to anyone who has enjoyed Capote's other works.

It wasn't until after seeing "Capote" (excellent film, by the by) that I got the itch to read something by the film's namesake. Thus far my first choice, "In Cold Blood," has been checked out every time I've gone to the library, so I settled instead for his first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms."

I was not surprised to see the young protagonist, Joel, as a reflection of Capote himself. What did interest me, however, was that in the twenty-fifth anniversary edition I was reading, Capote wrote a forward in which he claimed that it wasn't until re-reading the novel twenty-five years later that he "realized" that the boy was a version of himself. Whatever.

As far as the writing goes, Capote's prose is gorgeous, his physical descriptions lush and intricate, and the Southern vernacular is spot-on. It is easy to see why people were so taken with the novel; the reader sees and smells and feels everything he writes with stunning clarity.

In keeping with a Gothic tradition, however, Capote included some supernatural elements that actually felt really out of place. Some of them never got resolved (the old lady?!)...which perhaps I could have forgiven if the ending had any sort of resolution. It didn't. It felt almost like Capote had written himself into a corner and had no other way of ending than to construct something so far out that the reader was baffled enough to believe it was deep and thought-provoking. It kind of ruined the book for me, actually.

There's some good writing here, but not enough to compensate for the lack of continuity and some bizarre Gothic ploys that really detract from the flow of the main story. I'm not giving up on Truman yet, though, and would like to read more of his later works.

A wonderful fever dream. I'm certain about 1/3 of this went over my head, or slipped out of my hands, as this was mostly bedtime reading.

I'll def. reread this someday to help fill in some of the gaps. But for now I'm very impressed. I love that Joel displayed his ability to tell a lie pretty much as soon as he arrived at the landing. He couldn't help it, and it became his coping mechanism for being able to survive there. It's hard to believe this was a first novel, and came out in 1948.

Even though I'm pretty sure I didn't understand the ending at all, there was something about this witching (ghost?) tale that was hard to put down. Some incredible writing too.

It made me think of John from the podcast "s-town". I also recalled "suttree" with its dark moody atmosphere- unsure of what was real. It also made me think a little bit of "dandelion wine".

An unforgettable collection of grotesques, just trying to make it... crazy names too.