Such a lovely book. It is almost poetic. This read was a leisurely trip, comforting, and intriguing trip through the lives, hearts, and minds of a small group of delightfully unique people. Set in the the South US in an unnamed time period (probably around the 1930s, I surmised), It felt like floating down a bayou river through a strange and fascinating forest of trees hanging with moss while listening to exotic birds calling.

This is one of the most unusual styles of writing I have come across and I loved it. No wonder Truman Capote is a legend. Now I will have to read Breakfast at Tiffany's.

My 5 star review is ONLY for the short novel The Grass Harp.
The 'grass harp' is the Autumn wind blowing through the Indian grass below the hill where the Baptist Cemetery was. Dolly said the dry leaves sigh with human music ~~ a harp of human voices. Capote uses beautiful prose in this tale of three misfits in an eventful season of their lives; and the China tree that held them and housed them and saved them. I loved the story, it has a similar texture and feel that Harper Lee uses in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The short stories that are also included in the book, however.....
I did not like at all. I can't figure out what possible reason they were attached to such a lovely story.

I wish I could say I loved this book. Actually I think I am supposed to love it because of its author. But I found it a chore to get through in spite of it being so short. What I did lik were his description of a Southern town in the 1940s.

I found it hard to care about most of the characters and especially the main character Collin. Dolly was the most interesting.

I might try Capote again but with so many books to read he is not high on my list.

At first, "The Grass Harp" was hard for me to get into because it felt like readers were whiplashed from scene to scene with no clear indication of their correlation. It wasn't until the characters find themselves at the treehouse that the pacing became more welcoming and easier to get lost in the story's setting. Considering the time the story was originally written, I was pleased to see how inclusive the author was of different people (i.e. age, race, lifestyles, etc.). Capote does a great job describing the scenery and present the idea of finding one's purpose when freedom from routine societal roles are accomplished.

"Master Misery" was an intriguing concept - trading dreams for money. However, the way it was presented left me confused on what actually was happening during these transactions, especially when the main character kept talking about guys following her home or gazing upon her in a predatory way. There seemed to be a lot of gaps in the story where I felt more information would've been beneficial. I did relate to the main character though on the topic of finding a soul mate - feeling like the right one has gotten lost and all of the potentials that do exist are either unavailable or undesirable in our eyes.

"Children on Their Birthdays" seems like an odd title for this story when it doesn't really correlate with the storyline. The premise of the town's people, especially the boys, reacting to a visiting girl was enjoyable to read. However, the narrator POV was confusing at times; it felt like it was a member of the town reflecting on the events but you never got a clear indication on who they were or how they came to know of Miss Bobbit.

Of the stories so far, "Shut A Final Door" came off as the most coherent. It was easy to understand who the characters were and how they interacted with each other. It did feel like it finished a bit abruptly though.

"Jug of Silver" is a charming story of a small town participating in a guessing game surrounding a jug of silver coins. The story progressed smoothly and each character had a reasonable purpose. Probably my favorite of the short stories featured in this collection.

"Miriam" is quite the thriller of a piece, allowing a reader to interpret who the little girl is as they please. If one didn't want to go a fantastical route, one could easily associate the concept to mental health, especially those revolving around hallucinations and paranoia.

Of all of the stories in this collection, I have to say "The Headless Hawk" is my least favorite. The pacing of the story felt like molasses at times, making it hard to stay immersed.

"My Side of the Matter" is an intriguing concept. While the subject of family disapproving of a newcomer was familiar, this story seemed to miss a key component to the plot - why the family is against our main character. It was hard to side with any character when I felt confused on why the drastic reactions.

Once again, the title for "A Tree of Night" seems completely random in relation to the story. While the story was intriguing and kept my interest enough to see what happens next for the main character, I felt disappointed by the ending. It was confusing and I wasn't completely sure what it was implying.

Overall, this collection has a mixture of fantastic works and others that could use more work. It's a good selection of you are looking to introduce yourself to Capote's work.

I enjoyed this collection of short stories. Although The Grass Harp did not particularly resonate with me due to its heavy Southern context, the other stories were fantastic and creepy. Capote writes expertly to weave in tense feelings of dread with every tale, such a delight to read skillful prose.

True to his Capote style, these are quirky and compelling stories--slices of life that leave you with vivid and often disturbing images of the characters he creates. The most perverse of those characters--at least for me--appear in The Tree of Night where a young girl named Kay boards a train to Atlanta and, unfortunately, chooses to sit in a compartment with a tipsy woman and a crude, sexually suggestive man. While Kay notes they verge on the grotesque physically (the woman's outsized head, the man's boyish yet old face) she soon discovers that the distortions she can see are mere hints of their insanity. While I turned that last page on this story yesterday, this story is still firmly lodged inside my head and that woman and man continue to trouble me. Like Kay, I was permanently affected by coming into contact with them.

I think I must have missed something… An impressionable pre-teen. Two aging sisters. A BFF that stuffs her mouth with cotton. A “good ole boy.” A judge. A sheriff. A grifter. A free love gypsy with 15 children.

Trapped.

Trapped in relationships. Trapped by their own limitations. Trapped by their lack of empathy. Trapped by social conventions.

Hmmm, maybe I understood more than I thought…



More thoughts on books and stuff at mytossiecup.blogspot.com

This Capote anthology is (to me) eye-opening. I was unfamiliar with Capote's work except for their movifications, hence knew of but never read his work.
The Grass Harp is amazing. The language, the style, the voice, POV, ... The Grass Harp is SouthLit at its best. You can see the genre's transformation from O'Connor, Faulkner, and Erskine (and others) through Capote to Frasier and beyond. Writers, this novella is a goldmine of style, technique, and 1st person narrative.
I found the rest of the stories all across the scale. Master Misery and The Headless Hawk seemed like test runs of Breakfast at Tiffany's Holly Golightly. Miriam is one of the most terrifying stories I've read in a while and an excellent study for building tension and horror. Jug of Silver is an excellent read that seems unfinished or finished too quickly, as did Children on Their Birthdays.
It also seemed that Capote's strength lie in tales of the South. His New York stories seemed pushed, contrived, not so much that he was writing out of his element as he was uncomfortable with the element.
All in all a worthy read and recommended (especially for writers/authors wanting to study style, voice, technique, and language).

The first time I read a Truman Capote story I could have sworn I had read it before. Not trite or derivative, more like he drew these stories in fine silvery threads from my heart.

Read this because I enjoyed the movie. Hadn't realized it was a short story - and didn't read the rest of the stories in the collection, I'm afraid. Loved the quirky characters. My advice: read the story *before* watching the movie. This reminded me of Cold Sassy Tree and novels of that tradition of snug-bordering-on-corny-Americana, wonderful if done well, icky-sweet if mishandled.

I really liked this book! Whimsical and interesting with fun characters. And some lovely homoeroticism. Would recommend, with the caveat that it's an older Southern book, so a bit dated. But honestly not as bad as it could be.

Okay... Americans CAN write good "classic" fiction. Very home-spun story, but deceptively compelling story that pokes around the soft-spots of child abandonment, homosexuality, class-ism, racism, and small-mindedness versus small-town charm.