Book Review Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffanys
A short novella made famous by the 1961 film with George Peppard and featuring Audrey Hepburn’s stunning performance as Holly Golightly. Not to mention the song, Moon River.
BOOK REVIEW – TRUMAN CAPOTE – BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S 1958 Penguin Books
The story has a darker, more sardonic and bittersweet edge than the film, lifting it way above the status of Rom-Com.
A writer who doesn’t give his name, but who has the hard-boiled world-weary cynicism of a Philip Marlowe character narrates the story. It tells of his fascination, beguilement, and on-off relationship with the enigmatic socialite Holly Golightly.
He hears a great deal about her before they meet. She seems to have been all round the World. A neighbour is convinced that he has seen an African statue of her.
Golightly crashes into his rooms almost literally when she stumbles into his bedroom from the fire-escape one night, trying to get away from a lecherous admirer at a party in an apartment in the same block the narrator lives in.
He soon finds himself attending similar parties, with a memorable group of eccentric New Yorkers, who seem to drift from party to party. Golightly is something of a gold-digger and there is strong indication of her working as a high-class call girl. She certainly has a life of crime. She pretends to be related to a convicted felon so that she can visit him in prison, getting information to and from him relating to illegal work in his criminal empire.
She seems restless and uneasy. The more the narrator loves her, the more distant and enigmatic she becomes. She has a cat that follows her round everywhere, but ultimately seems as unsettled as she is.
The narrator hen finds that her ex-husband, a cold-hearted possessive figure, who cannot accept that she has left him, is stalking Golightly. He tends to keep a menagerie of pets and treats people as just as much a possession. It proves to be too much for a social butterfly like Golightly, whose lifestyle is too much that of a social butterfly.
As the hero gets to know her, circumstances change and she must take flight once more. Much carries on how he will help her and her cat to find their next chapter in life.
It’s a beautifully structured, fast paced funny and often sad story with utterly believable characters and a sense of an era that was already coming to a close when Capote captured its magic. It reads like Burroughs or Kerouac, without the drugs.
Arthur Chappell
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