Have you ever done anything on a lark and then had someone tell you that you couldn't do it? A minute ago you couldn't have cared less about the activity but as soon as someone dares to tell you you can't do it, you can't help but dig in your heels and insist on doing it. This is what happens in The Grass Harp when an unlikely trio decides to have a picnic in a tree house. It's an odd little tale but what can one expect from Truman Capote? Told in the first person, I can easily imagine sitting with Capote at a cocktail party listening to him relate this unusual story from his childhood.

A collection of Truman Capote’s novella and a collection of short stories, The Grass Harp, including A Tree of Night and Other Stories is a collection of stories revolving around particular places and the people that made them unique. Capote has collected together individual foibles of people and turned them in to a way to understand human behavior. Each story is very much a product of the time, deftly captured by Capote’s visceral writing style.

A waterfall of colour flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.

Finally caught up with my reading debt; saw an eclectic selection of fiction in a bookstore in Big Sur just 2 months ago. Wanted to check out something else by Truman Capote; I’m not usually a fan of short stories but thoroughly enjoyed this entire series.

I enjoyed the portrayal of small town America; its characters and the ways of amusement. Some of his short stories embodied horror and discomfort from the readers, others a sense of intrigue as strong is pitted against the weak (like the Grass Harp) and you wonder how it will all end. The feeling of ennui and listlessness perhaps mirrors how I’m feeling right now, slightly unmoored.

Pleasantly surprised that the NLB Singapore carries this as an eBook.

Excerpts:

Today, when I started out with the Sheriff’s part, I was a man convinced that his life will have passed uncommunicated and without trace. I think now that I will not have been so unfortunate.

“At home, in the kitchen, there is a geranium that blooms over and over. Some plants, though, they bloom just the once, if at all, and nothing more happens to them. They live, but they’ve had their life.” “Not you.”

I’ve read that the past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I know where to jump.

Love this. Reminded me of Harper Lee