Just Finished Reading: Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (FP: 1958) [158pp] 

Holly (actually Holiday) Golightly is the kind of Girl about Town you meet once and never forget. Falling in ‘love’ with her is easy, she’s a free spirit, a style sensation, a force of nature. Take her out, show her a good time, buy her drinks and dresses and you’ll have an evening to remember. Just never ask her who she really is, never ask her about her past, never ask her where she came from – unless you want to be cut dead, left on the sidewalk, never invited to another famous New York party at her sparsely furnished apartment. Holly has no past and no future. Holly has and is an eternal present. Enjoy it, and her while you can and while you can afford her. 

Like most people, I came across Miss Golightly in the 1961 rom-com directed by Blake Edwards starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly and George Peppard her long suffering neighbour/love interest Paul Varjak (although Paul wasn’t any kind of love interest in the book as he was quite clearly gay). The book – or rather novella/long short story as it’s a mere 98 pages – is VERY different in a lot of ways. For one thing Holly (in the book) in blonde and for another rather than a simple ‘good time girl’ or a girl just out to have fun while she’s young was quite clearly (at best) a borderline hooker. Not surprisingly when approached initially Hepburn wanted nothing to do with it for her reputation's sake. The story, such as it is, is rather ‘thin’ with Holly racing around New York, getting drunk, losing her keys, and looking for her next meal ticket whilst avoiding commitment and her less than glamorous past. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting from this modern classic, but I wasn’t hugely impressed. As it was a rather short work, the book also contains several of the authors' short stories – or should I say shorter stories. They were ‘House of Flowers’ where a prostitute looks for love – and finds it, much to the bemusement of her friends, ‘A Diamond Guitar’ about a friendship between two very different convicts at a labour camp and finally ‘A Christmas Memory’ about the annual baking of fruit cake in a very poor community. Although I wasn’t exactly entranced by any of the offerings here, they were not bad offerings although I did have to remind myself about some of the stories to even offer a one-line synopsis here. Reasonable.  

[Labels Added: 0, Labels Total: 33]