As far as short stories/novellas go, this was outstanding. Excellent writing and character development. And to top it all, a snarky and amusing narrator. I can’t wait to read it again.

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky"

"Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.”


I didn't know what to expect from Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, but I thoroughly enjoyed how Capote told his story. This backwards (at times almost nostalgic) glance at a life which had all but vanished from anything but memory (the whimsically kind and cruel and slightly tragic Holly Golightly) reminded me more of Willa Cather's My Antonia than Capote's other seminal work, In Cold Blood. Of course, Antonia and Holly Golightly have virtually nothing in common except how they occupy the center of the narrator's imagination.

When Jim Burden explores Antonia's character, he discovers depth he didn't fully understand when he was a boy. The narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany's finds a disarmingly charming shallowness in Holly that hides complexity neither he (nor the reader) can fully understand. In the end, the Holly of Capote's novella doesn't match the charming portrayal of Audrey Hepburn in the movie, but Holly, I think, was meant to be a little darker, someone closer to tragedy than the stuff of dreams.

I’ve seen the movie countless times, but I can’t remember the last time I saw it, but every time I have seen it, I’ve always been surprised by something I’ve either forgotten, or something I’ve seen in a new way.

I was looking for a way to keeping motivated to get through all this painting I’d planned, or at least as much of it as I can do myself, but it was so much easier, and tolerable with having an audio book to listen to. And I remembered my goodreads friend Jennifer, her review for Breakfast at Tiffany’s gave me the perfect choice.

An hour and a half of listening to it yesterday while painting, and another hour and a half of driving today to buy more paint, and I can only say that I loved this. Surprisingly, I loved the ‘book’ in a completely different way than the movie, and the narration by Michael C. Hall (Dexter) was amazingly!

Many thanks to Jennifer for her review that had me consider this as an audio. Please check out Jennifer’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Capote has a mesmerizing way with words. His description of the aptly named Holly Golightly is splendid and the character herself is a sort of blend of Daisy Buchanon and Madame Bovary. The friendship of the narrator Paul/"Fred" with Holly is beautifully and painfully described as are the parties and lovers that she entertains. I must see the film now...(see below)
The atmosphere of the book is a sort of bohemian yet preppy post-Beat decadence but with a tragic sexism that poisons Holly's relationships with everyone except the narrator. She is both an actor and a victim of her status as a sex object - this is what transports this story from something banal to something more complex and enduring.

The Diamond Guitar is a tender story of unrequited love as well, albeit homosexual love and longing and disappearance.

House of Flowers is a vivid depiction of a Haitian whorehouse, the Champs-Elysées and the sadomasochistic love of Ollite for Royal that leads her to an indifferent fate at the House of Flowers.

A Christmas Memory is a heartbreaking tale of camaraderie between a young boy and an older woman and their dreams of surpassing their humble existence.

Each of these stories of love, loss, and hope against hope that avoid sentimentalism in their cold rendering of events. It is more the external elements (the weather in New York, the changing seasons at the farm, the bee prophecy and the wind respectively) that color the psychology of the characters and their ambiguous fates.
I loved these stories and will read more of Truman Capote's work.

I started watching the movie with the amazing Audrey Hepburn as Golightly and George Peppard as "Fred" and find it captures the essence of the relationship between these two characters. However, why did they have Mickey Rooney do that ridiculous (and perhaps racist) imitation of Yunioshi, why not just have a Japanese actor. The other annoying thing about the movie is the comic spin that it puts to the book which while at times somewhat humorous was for the most part darker and more layered than depicted by Blake Edwards.

Holly Golightly, the heroine of Capote's 1958 novel, is one of the iconic characters in American literature. And Audrey Hepburn's portrayal in the movie three years later helped to assure Holly's immortality.

Oh Holly, what do we do with you? This beautiful woman is engaging, capricious, untidy, and attractive – mysterious too. She is beautiful on the eye to be sure, instantly attractive; everything seems exciting about her. On open book.

Dangerous.

An impending disaster.

One really wouldn’t want to fall in love with her – easy to do admittedly. Holly would drive you up the wall. It’s not just her passing tastes, her capriciousness, and her naked honesty – it’s the excitement, the risk. I know that’s not for everyone, but for this old bloke, years gone by – I would have lapped her up.

Any dalliance with Holly would certainly end in tears – yours, not hers. The striking thing about Holly is her indifference. Not inflicted in any conscious way, I am sure she doesn’t mean it. You could say she’s careless with the hearts and feelings of others.

Importantly, she doesn’t give false promises.

Just because others fall for her charms, and they are substantial, does that mean she’s obliged to reciprocate their emotions towards her? I’m not so sure.

I love her free spirit.

Capote, and this is my second experience with his work, was a genius.

5 Stars

n  “If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.”n

Told in a reflective and almost lyrical tone, this is the story of a writer, referred to as 'Fred', who reminisces about the neighbor he fell for back in 1943. The thing is, I’m not sure if we ever get a glimpse of the real Holly Golightly.

An enigma of sorts; Holly’s not one to get attached or share much of anything about her past. She avoids the truth by putting a fun and often ridiculous spin on things and she’s full of biting comments. It’s hard to say who she really is under that facetious facade. From all outward appearances, she’s a nineteen-year-old woman who enjoys the company of many men and pretty things. A woman making her way, amidst the excitement and wonder of New York City.

The few things she openly admits - the soft spot she has for her brother (the actual Fred) and her cure for the mean reds. She claims being surrounded by the quiet of Tiffany’s, although we don’t actually see any of that in the book, is enough to calm her soul. You can’t think of the movie, read this book, or in my case listen to the audio without picturing Audrey Hepburn as Holly. She’s become synonymous with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So my question is - what happened to the trips to Tiffany’s and the ring? Having seen the movie several times before listening to the audio, it felt to me like a piece of the story was missing. With a very different ending, the book didn’t come across as the great love story the movie did. It almost makes me cringe to say this, but I actually enjoyed the movie a tad bit more than the book.

The crazy cat lady in me has to mention how heartbroken I was that Holly left her “cat” behind, too. How could she? At least, he ended up with a home, I guess. And maybe even a name.

If you’re a Dexter fan, like me, you’ll love this audio. Michael C. Hall is the narrator and his voice is pretty unique. There were a few times his voice for Holly made me laugh, but for the most part, his narration was heavenly. At just under three hours, I found this to be a quick but wholly enjoyable listen.

Attempted to read in my teens, didn't do anything for me. Twenty-five years later, and now more literary adept, gave it another go. With much better results. Boy oh boy, could he write!.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

Holly is a petite little bundle of scandal in World War II New York society. She works her way through various characters, and any other men who can pay her tab. The narrator, an aspiring Capote-like writer, is her neighbor in their trendy-ish NYC apartment building. He is witness to her parade of gentlemen callers, and as he befriends her and falls in and out of love with her, bears witness to her dramas and the slowly revealed facets of her character and history.

The dialog in Breakfast at Tiffany's is snappy and moves along nicely, very much of the era, but it still sounds almost contemporary in tone if not in verbiage. Holly loves easily and leaves easily. She is easily angered and quick to forgive. She buys expensive gifts on a whim, expects to be treated to expensive things regularly. Eventually we find out where she's really from and how she became Manhattan's Girl About Town. Then she gets in some legal trouble and goes on the lam, leaving the narrator to pine wistfully over her postcards from Brazil or wherever she's fled to.

It's a cute, almost whimsical novel, and was probably much more scandalous when it was written. Neither the author nor the narrator ever come out and say that Holly is a lady of the night, but it's heavily implied. At best, she lives a sugar daddy lifestyle. Today her behavior would barely raise an eyebrow in Manhattan, but in the 40s, when it was written, such a female protagonist was more shocking.

Capote clearly wrote of his central characters with a big heart, of which there is also an echoing bittersweet sadness. It took little time at all to get into the story, which is sizewise of the short novel/lengthy novella mold. Doable in one or two sittings. A worthy read for sure.

I’m struggling to figure out what makes this quite so great, it could be Truman’s beautiful limpid style which winds its sentences through your inner ear so that you might think that language itself had been melted and turned into vanilla frosting or it could be that this is the sweet sad little tale of a guy who met this creature and got stuck permanently in the friend zone, and kind of almost didn’t really mind because at least the friend zone was something and not nothing, that’s how entranced he was, or it could be that one of the major characters is a cat. It could be that it’s funny, and kind, and that Holly says some really surprising things (just to mention one, that she thinks people of the same sex should be allowed to get married – in 1958!). But this novelette is a small 100 page thing, a drifting fragrance, a single chord, a glint, a hello then goodbye too soon, too soon – ah yes, itself therefore being the perfect embodiment of the Holly Golightly experience. So, of course – that’s why.

Review of Breakfast at Tiffany's, not the 'three stories'.
Two stars, rather than one, because I think Capote occasionally reached up to strike at something more - interesting - than the pretension of worldliness and world-weariness he explores here. And pretension is the main theme: I don't believe a single character for a moment. If only the 'phonies' weren't so damn dull.

And, oh! the misogyny! the casual racism! Capote created a story that can't exist out of its time frame, forgetting tempus fugit; reading it 50 years after publication, the slang is indecipherable, the mores obsolete (and good riddance). Whereas Fitzgerald creates and transcends his era, Breakfast makes me glad of the new century. Blah.

"It's better to look at the sky than live there; such an empty place, so vague, just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear"


[I'd forgotten how absolutely gorgeous Audrey Hepburn was]

Until a decade ago, I'd only seen the trailer for the film version. The phrase "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is iconic for that era. I'd not read the novel despite Truman Capote coming from the 2 states in which I've lived nearly all my life: Alabama and Mississippi, both of which have indisputably earned their places as regular punching bags of all outside the South, especially the cognoscenti and other snobbish bastards who would rather point fingers in a direction than look at all the bigotry around them.

I might be a little differently affected by this short novel than many others, especially those who grew up in a large metropolis. Before I explain what I mean, I'll say that I found Capote's short novel to masterfully display this young lady's complexities of character underlying the shallow facade of wealth. Capote shows how some of us are willing to do nearly anything to achieve a dream, no matter how grandiose or superficial others may find it. Holly Golightly was a dreamer extraordinaire or as Capote put it, a "lopsided romantic" whose trait of personality would never change.



A poignant line which I think best captures a major theme of the novel is Holly's observation late in the novel that:

"it's better to look at the sky than live there; such an empty place, so vague, just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

Though I've lived all my life in the American South, I'm not a redneck. I recall the first time I went to New York City. I was in awe, which is more of a small town thing than Southern. I've been many times since and the sheer size of it never fails to amaze me.

City people, particularly those in NYC, are disgusted by such provincialism--a contempt they cannot hide. Even though I'm straight, I think I can imagine how it must have been for an outcast sissy-boy from Monroeville, AL and Meridian, MS, trying to make his dreams come true in the Big Apple. Certainly, he would have been very sensitive and keenly observant of his environment in New York City, having grown up ostracized by his classmates. The fact that he was a gay man from down South up in the big city (suffering prejudices in NYC against not only his sexuality but much moreso against his Southern upbringing and drawl) probably served to further enhance his remarkable attention to detail in that society, at that time.

These difficulties formed an integral part of the artist who so vividly painted one of the best ever outsiders looking in with longing.