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Summary
Summary
Golden Globe-winning actor Michael C. Hall ( Dexter , Six Feet Under ) performs Truman Capote's provocative, naturalistic masterstroke about a young writer's charmed fascination with his unorthodox neighbor, the "American geisha" Holly Golightly. Holly--a World War II-era society girl in her late teens--survives via socialization, attending parties and restaurants with men from the wealthy upper class who also provide her with money and expensive gifts. Over the course of the novella, the seemingly shallow Holly slowly opens up to the curious protagonist, who eventually gets tossed away as her deepening character emerges.
Breakfast at Tiffany's , Truman Capote's most beloved work of fiction, introduced an independent and complex character who challenged audiences, revived Audrey Hepburn's flagging career in the 1961 film version, and whose name and style has remained in the national idiom since publication. Hall uses his diligent attention to character to bring our unnamed narrator's emotional vulnerability to the forefront of this American classic.
Author Notes
Truman Capote, 1924 - 1984 Novelist and playwright Truman Streckfus Person was born in 1924 in New Orleans to a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen. His parents divorced when he was four years old and was then raised by relatives for a few years in Monroeville. His mother was remarried to a successful businessman, moved to New York, and Truman adopted his stepfather's surname. He attended Greenwich High School and never went to college. When he was 17, Capote's formal education ended when he was employed at The New Yorker magazine. He belived he did not need to go to college to be a writer, since he was writing seriously since age 11.
Capote's first novel was "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (1948), which told the story of a boy growing up in the Deep South. "The Grass Harp" (1951) is about a young boy and his elderly cousin discovering that some compromise is necessary for people to live together in a community and was adapted to screen in 1996. The play "The House of Flowers" (1954) is a musical set in a West Indies bordello. Capote then wrote, "Breakfast at Tiffanys" (1958), which tells the story of how Holly Golightly goes to New York seeking happiness. Capote became preoccupied with journalism and, sparked by the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas, began interviewing the locals to recreate the lives of the murderers and their victims. The research and writing for this novel, "In Cold Blood" (1966), took six years for him to complete.
Other works of Capote's include the classic "A Christmas Memory" (1966), which is an autobiographical account of a seven-year-old boy, his cousin, and an eccentric old lady, "Music for Chameleons" (1981), which is a collection of short pieces, interviews, stories and conversations that were published in several magazines, and "One Christmas" (1982).
On August 26, 1984 in Los Angeles, Truman Capote died of liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. Published after his death were "Conversations With Capote" (1985) and "Answered Prayers: The Untitled Novel" (1986).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Golden Globe-winning actor Hall (Dexter, Six Feet Under) gives a warm reading of Capote's classic novella. The story is related by an unnamed narrator looking back at the autumn of 1943, when he lived in a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side and befriended his neighbor Holly Golightly. The enigmatic and beguiling young woman is a free spirit with no discernible means of support other than the kindness of the wealthy men who take her to fancy restaurants, swanky parties, and offer the occasional gift. For the next year, the narrator finds himself entranced, intoxicated, and exhausted by Holly's lifestyle, only to have their companionship end when circumstances extract her from the city and his life. Hall brings just the right tone to his narration. His characterizations are simply but effectively portrayed. He narrates the story with an earnest wistfulness that fully embodies the innocent infatuation of youth, but at the same time manages to infuse it with a sweet touch of the nostalgic melancholy. It is a solid, heartfelt performance that never lapses into corny sentimentality and will stay with the listener well after the last chapter. A Vintage paperback. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
IT WOULD BE HARD to think of two writers less alike - stylistically and, for that matter, personally - than Truman Capote and John O'Hara, yet they shared many preoccupations. Both were fascinated by society high and low, by how people climbed or toppled from one rank to the other, and by how sex and money underpinned the entire system. "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Capote's charming 1958 novella about a self-invented cafe society girl and the admiring writer who lives upstairs, is set during World War II. Most of the stories assembled in the recent Penguin anthology of O'Hara's New York stories were written in either the '30s or the '60s, but some are set decades earlier. And yet in the newly released audio recordings of the two books, maybe even more than on the page, the versions of New York that are evoked seem virtually interchangeable: It's a city of people on the make or else clinging to their former reputations, where everyone drinks too much, and where you can easily wake up in bed next to someone you barely remember meeting. Listening to Capote and O'Hara back to back, in fact, you have to concentrate to keep the characters in one recording from wandering into your recollections of the other, and from picturing Capote's Holly Golightly, for example - who once had a future in the movies and now pays the rent by accepting financial favors from men - showing up at "21" on the arm of one of O'Hara's fast-talking Hollywood producers. And that young couple who make a living from hosting creepy sex parties - it may take a moment to recall that they turn up not at one of Golightly's parties but in the deeply strange O'Hara story "A Phase of Life." O'Hara is now somewhat neglected and under-appreciated, and the print version of the New York anthology, edited by Steven Goldleaf, with a foreword by E. L. Doctorow, is part of a welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback. (I wrote the introduction to the new edition of O'Hara's first novel, "Appointment in Samarra.") But even readers familiar with O'Hara may be surprised by how many of these stories involve not his Park Avenue types but people in show business: agents, producers, writers, actors, many of them alcoholic has-beens. This is a world O'Hara knew well from his early days as a press agent, and like much of his best work, the stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting. So it's not inappropriate that the audio version employs, instead of a single voice, a whole cast of people, and not just audiobook veterans, but real actors. Some are household names, like Gretchen Mol, Bobby Cannavale and Jon Hamm (doubly appropriate, since Don Draper is an O'Hara character if ever there was one), while others, like Jan Maxwell, Dallas Roberts and Dylan Baker, have solid Broadway or TV credentials. The drawback to this scheme is that some of the cast (Cannavale is probably the worst offender) are inclined not just to read the stories but to act them out, overdramatizing the dialogue and laying the accents on thick. Unlike most story writers, who fret obsessively about what order the stories in a collection should follow, O'Hara thought that all of his stories were of equal value and so often presented them in his collections alphabetically by title. Goldleaf has adopted this practice, even though it means that contiguous stories are sometimes decades apart in setting (so that Lyndon Johnson, for instance, is president in one, and a while later Franklin Roosevelt is in the Oval Office) and in style. (The later stories are, in general, longer and more discursive than the earlier ones.) And this confusing arrangement is compounded in the audio version by the way the various narrators turn up unannounced. You have to consult the liner notes to know who's reading what. But part of what made O'Hara such a master of the short story was his ear, his way of capturing in print the sound of actual speech, and the best performances here catch his nuance and even add to it. Baker, for example, can do a perfect Brahmin accent, subtly underscoring the tension between the New York and Boston-born characters in O'Hara's great novella-length story "We're Friends Again." In "The Assistant," Mol delicately suggests the wistfulness and self-deception of an over-the-hill actress. Listening to these stories, perhaps even more than reading them, you're aware of how brilliantly O'Hara uses dialogue to convey exposition, and of how often his people, like Hemingway's, leave unsaid what is really on their minds. In the gym or in the car, with your earbuds plugged in, you feel as if you're eavesdropping on real lives. In the case of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," though, you may find that there's less dialogue than you remember. Capote's novella, some of the best writing he ever did, has in many ways been hijacked by the 1961 movie version, in which Audrey Hepburn, so elegant and winning, is not really the character Capote imagined (he had in mind someone more like Marilyn Monroe), and the George Peppard character is a far cry from the book's narrator, who is partly a version of Capote himself. The movie turns "Breakfast" into a heterosexual love story, which the book is only in a fablelike way, and ignores the degree to which it's an authorial coming-of-age story, in which the main voice is the narrator's own. It's tempting to imagine an audio version of "Breakfast" read by Toby Jones, who was so convincing as Capote in the movie "Infamous," though it would probably get irritating pretty quickly. The audiobook features Michael C. Hall, probably best known for "Dexter" and "Six Feet Under," and for the most part he delivers a straightforward, understated version of the text - a reading rather than a performance. This approach avoids all kinds of potential embarrassments (like Mickey Rooney's cringeworthy attempt at a Japanese accent in the movie) but also adds an element of literalism to the story, ignoring that Holly is in large part a confection, and leaches away some of the romance. What you miss is the sense that "Breakfast" is the story of a writer in love with his own beginnings, or his reimagining of them. O'Hara employs some writerly narrators as well, but they tend to be older and more cynical. They've seen so much that nothing surprises them anymore. And the one big difference between O'Hara's New York and Capote's is that Capote's is still a place of hope and possibility. In O'Hara there is sometimes a lingering sense that the city's best days, like those of the people who inhabit it, are already over, or that even if they're not, only an out-of-towner would admit it. CHARLES McGRATH, a former editor of the Book Review, is a contributing writer for The Times.
