Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read by Michael C. Hall. Grand Haven MI: Brilliance Audion, 1986.
Reason read: Because I read Like Water for Chocolate in honor of March being the best time to visit Mexico instead of in honor of the Oscars I decided to chose Breakfast for the Oscars even though this year the awards were dished out in February.
Everyone loves Holiday Golightly. Holly, as she is known to her friends, seems to appeal to all kinds of men and a certain kind of woman. This sassy and shallow teenager makes her way through a Manhattan existence surviving as a society girl, an “American Geisha” as Capote called his creation. She is eye candy to dangle on the arm of a wealthy gentleman so that he might buy her dinners in fancy restaurants, expensive gifts, and maybe, breakfast or two at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly wants to be taken seriously but she is seen as more of an unusual mystery than anything else.
Told from the point of view of her neighbor, a writer who befriends her and becomes enthralled with her (like everyone else), he wants to believe his relationship with her is different. He believes she isn’t using him because he has nothing to offer…until she has nothing to offer him.
As an aside, I am betting many more people have seen the movie than read the book.
Favorite line, “Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion” (p 134).
Author fact: Truman Capote also wrote the short story A Christmas Memory which I make my staff watch every year because I love it so much.
Book trivia: this is actually a novella. Short. Short . Short. You can read it in one sitting.
Narrator trivia: Michael C. Hall is the same actor who played serial killer Dexter.
Nancy said: The curious thing about what Nancy said about BAT is this – she includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the “American Girls” chapter and then discredits the choice by saying, …all novels about female Americans abroad owe a debt to Henry James…Many of them owe at least a little something to Truman Capote’s greatest invention, Holly Golightly, heroine and heartbreaker of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s not my subject here” (p 18). Does Holly belong in this chapter or not?
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “American Girls” (p 18). See previous paragraph for my comment on this.
~*LunaSea*~ 