I am currently on a cruise ship for which I did not adequately prepare reading material and have no access to the Ottawa Public Library or internet. So I am limited to the small library onboard. From that I first picked Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile but never ever read such filth, disguised as cheap standup slapstick, and abandoned it by page 80. Even the flawed New Yorker, Truman Capote, seemed preferable.
C’est In Breakfast At Tiffany’s, his first and favourite novelan enigmatic Holly Golightly, shares a brownstone apartment in NYC with a neighbouring aspiring writer, as he tries to figure out her background and how she earns a living. She frequently visits a mafia boss in jail and eventually flees the country-only the reader knows her destination. Her safe favourite location to dine is said to be Tiffany’s.
In Other Voices, Other Times, his second novel, here combined with his first, a New Orleans 12 year old boy, orphaned when his mother dies, travels to rural Missouri to stay with his father whom he has never met, only to be stymied by well-wishing but suspicious servants. What little plot there is then gets completely lost as it becomes bizarre ravings of disconnected characters and dreams that I can only conclude are the hallucinatory dreams of a drunken cocaine addict, at times overtly homoerotic, which I suspect they really were. The mystery to me is why any publisher would deem this trash fit to publish. Perhaps it related to the early success of Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
I will give Breakfast At Tiffany’s a reluctant 3/5, but can’t get beyond 1.5/5 for Other Times, Other Voices.
In contrast to his other books, Capote’s In Cold Blood is a very well written chilling true account of a multiple murder, although a bit fictionalized.
The Passionate Reader 