La profundidad y complejidad de los personajes que construye de una forma tan simple te hace engancharte desde la primera página, además empatizas que flipas porque entiendes todos sus grises.
Algo muy guay es que habla de algunas personas de las altas esferas sociales y culturales del siglo xx y cuenta con cositas con el rigor histórico que le sale del pijo (ve la serie de Los Cisnes de Ryan Murphy que te va a encantar)

Crea unos escenarios súper interesantes y los enriquece de tal manera que te hace fantasear con el lujo y el diseño de interior midcentury.

Lo único que me ha chirriado han sido esos tintes misóginos de marica que vuelca en ciertos personajes femeninos, además que hay tantos personajes con nombres yankis que se entremezclan en las diferentes movidas que les pasan y me lío equis de

Well I suppose it was a good thing that the friends Truman Capote chose to publicly betray and humiliate were mainly a bunch of high society matrons (including one on her deathbed from cancer) because otherwise I think someone might have gotten his ass kicked. Deservedly.

Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping! Reading this was like being forced to spend a weekend with some long-winded, pretentious air-quoter who glories in dropping the names of all of his famous friends and acquaintances - most of whom I've never heard of - while also doing his gossipy, petty best to trash each of them completely, on the most repulsively personal of levels. I've had to deal with such weekends, it's not fun. Just like this book: not fun. I wanted sparkling, somewhat malicious wit, not an open-mouthed deep dive into the sewers led by a person who loves talking shit.

This was a particularly sad and frustrating experience because prior to this book, Capote had talent to burn. Some of his stories are amazing. I read his classic In Cold Blood way back in college and it still stays with me, his ability to get inside a head, that calm mastery of his effects, the indelible prose. The intensity, the tension, the restraint.

But burn that talent he did, and how. Capote certainly didn't do things by halves. There is the ghost of a vaguely intriguing idea in this incomplete set of linked novellas, but it is totally lost in the toxic crap. The last one "La Côte Basque" is possibly the single most tediously bitchy story I've ever had the displeasure of reading. It is also the story that ruined Capote: his friends all understandably turned their backs on him after being vilified in print, and he sunk into a pit of alcohol, drugs, and a particularly Capote-esque stew of megalomania and depression. Karmic payback's a bitch, much like Capote. I shed a theoretical tear for the talent lost but certainly not for the man himself.

This was a pretty interesting book. I can see how it caused a scandal when these stories were published in the 1960’s. It’s still extremely scandalous but the main difference now is pretty much everyone from these stories are now deceased. I spent a great deal of time Googling who was real and who was fiction and who was based on who. Overall I enjoyed reading it

„Die heilige Theresia von Ávila bemerkte einst: ,Es werden mehr Tränen über erhörte Gebete vergossen als über nicht erhörte.‘ Das Thema (...) ist (...), wie Menschen ein verzweifeltes Ziel nur um den Preis erreichen, dass es auf sie zurückfällt- und ihre Verzweiflung verstärkt und beschleunigt.“ (S. 33)
Der Roman ist leider (und zum Glück) Fragment geblieben.

La Cote Basque contained some of the most delicious excerpts i’ve ever read. answered prayers is a tricky book to rate- most of the chapters are missing and we’re left with an exceptionally well written semi autobiographical novel of unorganized ramblings. you’ll read pages and pages of incoherence and then suddenly find yourself grasped in a snippet of a storyline that has you by the throat but that you’ll never get to read to completion. i’m fascinated by kate mc cloud but a lot of her lore, sadly, is missing. la cote basque was the most cut and dry of the chapters which is why i loved it- not to mention all the salacious gossip that i was dying to unpack.

the whole thing is sooooo inside by dan humphrey coded

Whatever possessed Capote to turn on his lifelong friends, like Jackie O. and her sister, Lee Raziwill, William and Babe Paley, and the rest of the New York social set is beyond me. The fact that this novel was contracted for in 1966 and remained unpublished until after his death, says much about his ambivalence towards the project. At the same time, Capote spent many years being the lapdog to moneyed New Yorkers, wined and dined at the finest restaurants before going back to his room at the YMCA. He was also one of the organizers of the Black and White Ball, one of the seminal social events in NYC in the seventies. Perhaps the reality disconnect between his humble beginnings and those of the plutocrats, or his rented room and their uptown mansions simply got to be too much to take. Whatever the case, when Esquire Magazine published four chapters from the manuscript, there was a firestorm of controversy that left Capote shunned by the upper crust.

In Handcarved Coffins, Capote states, ...great fury, like great whiskey, requires long fermentation." That is certainly the case here. The swishy little man with the wispy little voice wielded his pen like a saber, and heads rolled. Including his.

It’s clear that Copote is a talented writer and I’m not saying I’ll never pick up another one of his books ever again, but reading this felt like being on a bad date, trying to get a word in while the man simply won’t shut up. Sometimes it was funny, but the majority of the time I wanted to bash my head against the table.

Full of language that would get Capote cancelled today by literally everybody, I can’t help but wonder what this book would have become if TC had not self-sabotaged his career and if it had been subjected to a solid editing process. Capote’s storytelling talent is on display even in this train wreck of an unfinished book. I can see why the Swans flipped out about Le Cote Basque.

"Would you care to hear a truly vile story? Really vomitous?"

Not going to lie: that's exactly what I came for. But I leave it feeling uncomfortably complicit in Capote's bitter spite. His incisive descriptions are wielded here less like a scalpel and more like a melee weapon, inflicting as much gleeful cruelty as possible, and it became the grotesquerie that kept me reading rather than the prose itself: this is Capote past his prime and he knew it. OF COURSE it was entertaining...it was also Capote's schadenfreude writ large.

So why did Capote bite the hands that fed him? Resentment that he had been granted some conditional entrée into their world but was never accepted as being *of* their world? Because he saw his artistic potency and promise dwindling and wanted to lash out? Because he was too addled on booze and pills to give a rat's ass anymore? I don't know, but I am reminded of the fable of the frog and the scorpion: perhaps he stung them because it was just his nature.

In any case, the introduction by long-time Capote editor Joseph M. Fox is worth the price of admission, and serves as both context and apologia for what follows.

Más difícil que separar al autor de su obra es separar a la obra de su inspiración.

Me es imposible no despreciar un poco la exposición descarada de la intimidad de una persona, por más mezquina o extravagante que esta sea; pero si separo con éxito a Plegarias atendidas de su origen, no puedo evitar encontrarme con una obra tan irresistible como las historias de la peor de las lenguas viperinas.

Con un protagonista que no engaña ni al lector ni a sí mismo sobre su naturaleza oportunista e indolente, no puedo más que lamentarme por esta obra inacabada en la que justo queda a disposición de nuestra imaginación la caída de su controvertido antiheroe; para una mente inquieta las posibilidades son infinitas, pero queda el mal sabor de no poder verlas plasmadas en el tono cínico y medio burlón que Capote le imprimió a su atrevido P. B. Jones.

De todos modos Plegarias atendidas vale la pena por su tono, por su autor y por supuesto, por la historia que nos alcanza a contar. El ritmo es entretenido y la temática no podría haber caído en manos más expertas.

Qui mi è mancato il Capote dallo sguardo innocente dell'inizio; qui, quel Capote, non c'è...

The last segment went completely over my head, which was self-described as the heart of Capote's charm: his observations of social norms and habits of New York and Europe's socialites with quite a bit of sexual frankness. But it came across as superficial gossip with minimal prose or lyricism. I'm not sure I could actually tell someone what this book is about.