1924 - 1984… Truman Capote is a writer with generational stamp, I would almost say stigmatized, like any stamp or label that is endorsed without possible revision. It happens that our natural tendency to group, associate, characterize and label as if everything were a product ends up limiting all kinds of creative or artistic expression. Raw but real.
There should be no generations of I-don't-know-what or tendencies of I-don't-know-how. But well..., I'm leaving the topic. Truman Capote strictly concerning his work (perhaps it was his subversive nature that led me to this last ramble).
The point is, good Truman was that sought after emblem, yes. His novels, authentic social chronicles (both on the brilliance of opulence and on the most decadent and rugged on the other side of society), magnetized a critic that elevated him to altars or tore him apart. Between them they ended up forging the myth even more.
Vital references necessary to substantiate your work, let's go to the task of setting your 3 best novels, Those recommended books of Truman Capote and the order that I give them in terms of my greatest reader sympathy.
Recommended novels from Truman Capote
Cold-blooded
Agreeing with the majority is not always a crime. Almost everyone assures that this is the masterpiece of Truman Capote. For once, and without being a constant, I agree with the majority. Eviscerating the idiosyncrasy of a small town to extrapolate it to the whole of an always polarized country like the United States, is always interesting...
On November 15, 1959, in a small town in Kansas, the four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered in their home. The crimes were apparently unmotivated, and no clues were found to identify the killers. Five years later, Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith were hanged as guilty of the deaths.
Based on these facts, and after carrying out long and meticulous investigations with the real protagonists of the story, Truman Capote He turned his storytelling career upside down and wrote 'In Cold Blood', the novel that definitively established him as one of the greats of twentieth-century North American literature.
Capote follows the life of the small town step by step, sketches portraits of those who would be the victims of such a gruesome and unsuspected death, accompanies the police in the investigations that led to the discovery and arrest of Hickcock and Smith and, above all, concentrates in the two psychopathic criminals to build two perfectly outlined characters, whom the reader will get to know intimately. 'In Cold Blood', which was baptized, pioneeringly and provocatively, by Capote as a "non fiction novel", is a shocking book that, from the very date of its publication, became a classic.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
It must be recognized that there is no better portrait of the special cosmos that made New York the center of the world. It is not that it is a story about the splendor of the great city of the mid-20th century, but about the characters who moved between Fifth Avenue and its emblematic skyscrapers.
Holly Golightly is, perhaps, the most seductive character created by this master of seduction who was Truman Capote. Attractive without being beautiful, after rejecting an acting career in Hollywood, Holly becomes a star of the most sophisticated New York; Sipping cocktails and breaking hearts, she seems to earn a living begging for money on her boudoir expeditions in trendy restaurants and clubs, and lives surrounded by the craziest guys, from a gangster serving time in Sing Sing who she visits weekly, to a wayward millionaire with Nazi affinities, passing through an old bartender secretly in love with her.
A mixture of mischief and innocence, of cunning and authenticity, Holly lives in permanent provisionality, without a past, not wanting to belong to anything or anyone, feeling exiled everywhere despite the glamor that surrounds her, and always dreaming of that paradise that stops she is Tiffany's, the famous New York jewelry store. «Breakfast at Tiffany's»Is an extraordinary short novel that, by itself, would be enough to consecrate an author.
Summer cruise
This novel has a very particular point. It is about the unfinished work. For that reason alone, Capote's devotees consider it worthwhile to try to reach the author's imagination. Suppose, digress, pose the ending that Capote did not find.
A different story to recreate... Grady McNeil is seventeen years old and has convinced her parents to leave her alone in the apartment in Central Park while they go on a summer cruise. No one can explain why she disdains Europe for the New York summer. But Grady has a secret: she is in love. A love with barriers. Because Grady, born at the top of the social ladder, loves Clyde Manzer, a twenty-three-year-old young man who works in the parking lot where she keeps her car. Clyde is Jewish, a war veteran and from the lower, very lower middle class.
A vacation love affair that will become more serious, murkier, more equivocal… In 1966, Capote moved from his Brooklyn apartment and left a box of papers that the building's doorman rescued.
In 2004, the contents of that box were auctioned at Sotheby's. And there was this manuscript, the novel that Capote had begun to write in 1943, which he continued to work on for years, and then abandoned.
