Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I bought this Truman Capote 700+ page book so that I can read and review some of its contents, including ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’.
Some of my other reviews of Truman Capote works can be found in the list HERE.
I have found it appropriate to recommend his work to readers who enjoy many of the horror and weird books I review on this site.
When I commence my review, it will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above…
Up to \”It’s a chamber of horrors.”
“…her eyes had an assessing squint, like a jeweler’s.”
… on the rare occasion 18-19 year old Holly Golightly takes off her sunglasses!
The unnamed narrator’s engaging portrait of the chronically key-losing Holly, sharing the same block of flats and her wholly go-lightly relationships. She calls him ‘Fred’ after her brother, so I will call him Fred, too. Fred is recounting all this some years after the events, after being reminded of her by an African sculpture found by others connected with Holly when on an expedition to the wilds of that continent, a sculpture that looks remarkably like a likeness of Holly’s head! A preternatural synchronicity worthy of my Dreamcatching…?
“Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.”
Holly’s version of small talk or flirtation with ‘Fred’ is either verbal diarrhoea or an amusing creative use of bending, veering, twisting in conversational audit trails, as she covers the subject of fiction writers like ‘Fred’, lesbians and Sally Tomato (the man she visits in jail), and more.
Temperamental, too.
To the background of pigeons “gargling on the fire escape.”
“She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.”
‘Fred’ tells us that Holly turns over a new leaf after their argument, and gets her own entrance key, without her now bothering him. But then they later re-engage and when ‘Fred’ goes round for drinks, she is showering, and he meets OJ Berman who spills the beans of the low-key filmic career of Holly, expecting more knowledge than ‘Fred’ actually has, until Holly emerges from the shower and picks up the cat…
Later I shall pick up the thread…
Meanwhile, we garner more of the gestalt of Golightly, with our building up the trickledown leitmotifs of the wittily-honed text. A lightsome Goliath of a work, if that is not a contradiction in terms,
“After that, marriage and divorce sustained his place in the tabloid-sun.”
A tabloid-sun in 1958?
Holly’s gathering of three becomes a real party of sparklingly conveyed characters, each of whom is a stranger to the other, all of them invited by Holly discretely if not discreetly!
Her cool chatter exposes aspirations regarding Tiffany’s… Along with the phrase ‘ego tagging’.
And a wonderful character called Mag Wildwood…
“She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty.”
“The saleslady was occupied with a group of nuns who were trying on masks.”
Sounds like a Federico Fellini film to me, as Holly and ‘Fred’ go out to celebrate his having a story accepted for publication.
Then, with Holly’s encouragement, stealing masks from a shop by wearing them before walking out without paying for them.
That’s a rum do, too. Seems to me to be a perfect emblem for all wordprint-masked fiction itself?
“She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down.”
“We had an irresistible guide, most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don’t go much for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting:”
“That’s how your stories sound. As though you’d written them without knowing the end.”
The last two statements are Holly’s. And there are many other indications of the polarities of her self: so many polarities that she spins in the mind of the reader. Good and bad, cruel and kind, honest and dishonest, disloyally promiscuous and generously loyal – an interbreeding within the single soul, a miscegenation of the birdcage mind.
Like that earlier quote about someone else: an overcome ugliness can excel intrinsic beauty. We can only hope while we shake our heads and wonder if the St Christopher Medal — bought by ‘Fred’ for Holly in Tiffany’s before she leaves on her South American trip — lost its own way rather than Holly losing it herself?
“Never love a wild thing,”
Never love a wild book unless you want to be made wild yourself.
We now learn Holly’s real-name and the touching backstory, here become front of stage, about once being ‘married’ when she was 14 to a man named Doc Golightly.
“–it’s better to look at the sky than live there.”
“Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzbue Wildwood.”
So that is Mag’s full name!
Some amusing as well as sad misunderstanding, as Holly’s breakdown is not concerned with a lost lover called Rusty but her brother Fred’s loss in action. She stops calling me ‘Fred’ from that point on.
She has a Brazilian boy friend now and tries to learn Portuguese, and I am jealous, I admit to myself.
Intriguing, in this context, that, in my current review of a Brazilian author, just started, of Clarice Lispector’s stories here, I had reason earlier today to mention Truman Capote’s work.
As I read on, Holly’s character, as well as my own, develops almost to the point where we literally LIVE. I wonder if Lispector’s ‘Obsession’ and sense of polarised or magnetised destinies are drawing us (Holly and I) nearer and nearer, despite the wildness of temperament?
But what about the Tobacco Tapioca? Best not to describe it.
“Suddenly, watching the tangled colors of Holly’s hair flash in the red-yellow leaf light, I loved her enough to forget myself, my self-pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen. Very gently the horses began to trot, waves of wind splashed us, spanked our faces,…”
My horse-riding with Holly before she leaves for Brazil is exuberant, exhilarating – and eventually dangerous. But then her visiting Sally Tomato in Sing Sing suddenly makes sense soon afterwards. Watch the famous film of this novella if you want to know about this turn of events, I guess. Not that I have ever watched it.
“; her eyes were dilated by unhappy visions, as were mine: iron rooms, steel corridors of gradually closing doors.”
The gradually closing doors of this work, as Holly skedaddles off to Clarice Lispector Land. I eat a galaxy chocolate in celebration of this fine work. Sorry for her cat, though. And the possibly green guitar…
“The guitar filled with rain,…”
Holly a literary icon of a character. Heartwarming. Go lightly when you cross swords with her words, Tobacco or Tomato Tapioca notwithstanding.