Contra tot pronòstic l'he acabat!

M'ha costat molt i crec que és per dos motius:

1. Me l'he llegit en anglès i el vocabulari que utilitza... sort que l'he llegit amb kindle i diccionari, però utilitza moltes paraules antigues, jo crec que en clau irònica o humurística, i moltes paraules compostes per descriure comportaments o personatges, que aquestes no sortien al diccionari del kindle. Això, sumat al factor 2, m'ha fet que costi avançar.
2. El tema bàsicament gira entorn a l'alta societat, amb escenari a Nova York, i al principi sembla que hauries d'estar enterat de tot per seguir el fil i entendre les relacions entre personatges, però després aprens que això és secundari.
3. He dit que eren dos pero en són tres. El llibre és una mica dispers. Són tres parts i dins les parts es van entrellaçant històries amb diferents personatges i en un espai-temps diferent.

De totes maneres, he disfrutat molt, sobretot el final. En les dues primeres parts el protagonista, P.B. Jones, que en realitat és com un alter ego pervers i exagerat del Truman Capote, té més rellevància i va combinant explicacions sobre la seva vida amb relata sobre ell coneixent a diverses persones, totes riques i generalment desquiciades per A o per B.

L'última part, la Côte Basque, és en realitat el primer article (d'aquesta sèrie de tres que pòstumament van esdevenir la novela) que va publicar a Squire, i és el que m'ha divertit més perquè és pur cotilleo. Bàsicament és un únic escenari: La Côte Basque, un restaurant mega exclusiu de Nova York, i aquí una de les seves amigues li explica safareigs sobre absolutament tothom que hi ha pel voltant i gent de fora també. La gràcia és que tot això que explica en realitat és veritat, són coses que van confiar-li al Truman Capote les seves amigues de l'alta societat, i canviant el nom va i les publica a una revista famosíssima. Total que aquest llibre és la raó per la que acaba morint sol i acoholitzat.

Crec que el tornaré a llegir en castellà més endevant perquè estic segura que m'he perdut coses. Ha estat una lectura molt diferent, a moments anava molt perduda però l'he disfrutat, a part que m'apassiona el personatge del Truman Capote

this book was hard to read...the last two chapters were much more engaging than the first, and capote succeeds in dropping names, dishing gossip, and creating an atmosphere of dramatic extravagance. however, every character in this book feels like an unsympathetic caricature. even more, the strong strains of vulgarity, racism, and misogyny running through this book make even the best passages difficult to enjoy.

como buena cotilla me parece icónico que expusiera a esta gente y me da pena que no terminara la novela

This book lacked the final polish and rewrite an author would give to his work. For this reason, I felt it shed light on Capote's writing methods. Not jis greatest but very good considering he never finished it.

Reading this book was like being a guest at a long and tedious dinner party in which people try to be interesting by telling a succession of stories about other people that they think others will find "fabulous, dahling".... but, unfortunately.. they're not. A few are modestly interesting, but most of them are dull or rely upon some supposedly shocking (or gross) twist. At one point I felt very much like the book's protagonist, who is unable to continue eating his dinner due to a particularly stomach-turning vignette. I kept thinking the book would get better, but instead it devolved page after page into a big bore.
I imagine that Capote found these socialites, unscrupulous libertines, and rich people interesting when he was younger, but he seemed to have grown to almost despise their artificiality and pompousness when he got older. Or perhaps his alcoholism added a bitter and vitriolic layer to his personality.
In general, I found this book lacking in humor although it has a few witty lines here and there (perhaps not so much "witty" as "bitchy" in most cases"). The people and places depicted in this book did not particularly intrigue me. It is a babbling brook of a book, but the brook leads nowhere.
God knows Capote could write like a master, but he settled for this kind of prattle in his last years of life rather than giving us another "Other Voices, Other Rooms", or "In Cold Blood".
I did not really want to finish reading this hot mess of a book, but once I was about half-way through it I decided to finish it as it is mercifully not that long as it is was "unfinished" by the author. It should've also probably been unpublished as well as unfinished, but the publisher couldn't resist due to the author's past literary success. I was happy to move on to something better.
This is one dinner party you may want to decline an invitation to unless you are fascinated by a lot of hot-winded people blabbing on and on while getting loaded.

I found this to be positively dreadful.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve read a number of books about this group of New York high society women in the 60s that befriended Truman and how he squandered it all by writing a tell all essay airing everyone’s dirty laundry. I find the whole situation so deeply fascinating and figured that I should read the actual story that made the house of cards crumble.

This book was scattered, unhinged, unnecessarily lewd and nearly impossible to follow. I know it’s “unfinished” but I would find myself going back a page because it felt like I was missing pages. One paragraph would end a sentence and the next paragraph seemed to be a completely unrelated story and ultimately I just couldn’t wait to finish so that I could move on to something else.

A too-thin roman á clef that cost Truman many "friends" and access to the well-heeled set. I thought I would know who was who and what was happening after reading books about this book and the jet set that liked having him around. Alas, I had no idea; the story seems jumbled, a lot of gossip. Of course it was actual gossip and things he'd been told first hand. Found it unappealing despite Capote's brilliant writing. Maybe I'll try later; I was just lost.

y mira que me gusta a mí un buen coti vintage.

n  

As truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion – but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he recreates himself as a woman (illusion) – and of the two, the illusion is the truer.

n
I learned of Answered Prayers while reading The Swans of Fifth Avenue, and although it's an “unfinished novel”, the history behind this book just might be more interesting than the book itself. Wanting to make a Proustian tableau of the rich and famous of his day (in an effort to record Perfect Truth), Truman Capote went to work on his journals and correspondence, arranging and rearranging decades worth of anecdotes into a nonfiction novel of his own life. Capote had been paid a large advance for this book, but despite always assuring his publisher that it just needed a bit more polishing, the due date kept getting pushed back (by years), Capote would negotiate more advances by bundling this title in with other books he was working on, and in the end, he died without finishing it. Capote did, however, arrange for Esquire to publish four chapters from Answered Prayers over the years (one chapter was later published in a different collection of stories, leaving three completed chapters for this book proper) and those excerpts had a devastating effect on Capote's personal life: Telling the secrets of his high society friends led to at least two suicides and Capote's banishment from their inner circle. Capote's response: What did they expect? I'm a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think that I was there just to entertain them?

From the three chapters that are finished, the linking factor is the narrator P. B. Jones: a bisexual hustler who uses his youth and good looks to go from penniless orphan to the companion of jet-setters. Of his childhood he says: I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore – there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate. (This character is apparently an amalgam of Capote and one of the killers from In Cold Blood, Perry Smith, that Capote is said to have fallen in love with.) As Jones is a gigolo, there is a lot of sex in this book, and as Capote was working from his collection of anecdotes about the rich and famous, there's a very catty, gossipy vibe. Some could be funny:

n  

Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty's, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I'd met when he photographed me for Boaty's magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, "The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking." Garbo, after a mournful pause, "Ah, if only I could say the same.")

n
And some could border on defamatory (the following is from a section apparently based on Tennessee Williams):

n  

“How about it?” he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. “Roll over and spread those cheeks.”
“Sorry, but I don't catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no.”
“Ohhh,” he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet potato pie, “I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar.”

n
Consistently, Capote is able to capture a character with just a few sentences; often scathingly:

n  

• Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck inside her, she'd look like a porcupine.

• She was somewhat porcine, a swollen muscular baby with a freckled Bahamas-burnt face and squinty-mean eyes; she looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf.

n
With just the three non-consecutive chapters (and despite totalling nearly two hundred pages), it's hard to evaluate Answered Prayers as a novel. The writing is certainly interesting (although I got the impression that Capote was trying a little too hard to be shocking while acting blasé; I chose “clean” quotes believe it or not) and each section does stand up as a short work on its own. I'd love to know if Capote ever finished any more of it (he always claimed to have finished this book although no drafts of any form surfaced after his death), or if he cared more about his social death than he let on; if along with his friends he lost his confidence and his muse. I don't know if Capote would have achieved the Proustian ideal, but I'm giving four stars for the quality of what he did accomplish; truth is another matter.

n  

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

n

Oh my. Truman, honey, just … no. I take back what I said in my review of n  Summer Crossingn about how "nothing Capote writes is ever disappointing," because this one made me very, very sad. I'm not saying not to read it, though, because if you don't you'll miss out on quotable lines such as “Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck in her, she'd look like a porcupine.” It pains me, but I can't possibly give this one more than two stars … and one of those stars is just because Truman Capote – who is otherwise an extraordinary writer – wrote it. At least now I can say that I've read all of his novels, I suppose.

In 1975, Truman Capote published a thinly veiled account of the Woodwards' story, Answered Prayers, which accused Ann of outright murder. The past dug up for all to see, Ann Woodward killed herself by taking a cyanide pill. The story was also adapted by Dominick Dunne in the Two Mrs. Grenvilles.

"Erhörte Gebete" ist mein drittes Buch von Capote und hebt sich von den anderen beiden ab. Irgendwie erinnerte es mich ein wenig an Vonnegut, ein wenig an "The Great Gatsby" und ein wenig an Paul Auster. Irgendwie an alles, nur nicht Capote. Aber vielleicht habe ich den Autoren auch nur falsch eingeschätzt.

Auf jeden Fall lesen sich die Gebete sehr unterhaltsam. Wir besuchen die Welt der Reichen und Schönen, der Emporkömmlinge. Wir sind bei Orgien dabei, fleischlichen wie alkoholischen. Es wird geheiratet und geschieden. Es geht wild zu und her in diesem Buch und das macht es zu einer kurzweiligen Lektüre, auch wenn dies ab und an ihre Längen hat.

Aufschlussreich war das Nachwort, das die Entstehungsgeschichte dieses Fragments aus fast schon erster Hand erklärt. So erhält man ein besseres Verständnis für Capote, seinen Text und dessen Inhalt. Diesen Teil fand ich ehrlich gesagt fast noch interessanter als die Geschichte selbst. Denn diese werde ich wahrscheinlich rasch vergessen haben und für einen Reread war es dann doch nicht grossartig genug. Dann lieber noch einmal Tiffany.