Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Is it wrong that I kept seeing Audrey Hepburn in my mind's eye while reading Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote's best-known novella? I guess it's understandable, given how iconic Hepburn's portrayal of Holly Golightly is. In fact, I think Hepburn's Holly may well be my all-time favourite movie heroine. She's a slut, a snob and a gold-digger, and her life is so shallow and vapid that it should be reprehensible to me, but at the same time she is so delightfully charming and eccentric that it is impossible not to fall under her spell and end up madly in love with her. As played by Hepburn, Holly is the ultimate It Girl, witty and beautiful and so stylish it hurts, but vulnerable and conflicted enough for us not to envy her.

Capote's Holly is slightly different from Hepburn's. She is tougher and more potty-mouthed than her movie counterpart, with a touch of racism that I don't remember from the film. She also seems a bit more hell-bent on self-destruction, and less inclined to be saved by the well-meaning narrator. For these and other reasons, she should be mildly off-putting, but for some reason she's not. I guess it's because she is immensely alive -- less girlishly and innocently so than in the film, but just as alluring. And she doesn't need Hepburn's charm to come off the page. Capote did a great job imagining Holly and fleshing her out, giving her one good line after the other and endearing quirks galore. It probably isn't fair to him that I (along with millions of other readers, no doubt) kept picturing Audrey Hepburn while reading his descriptions of Holly, to the point where I was shocked to discover Capote imagined her as a blonde (surely not?), but thankfully, my love for the film didn't prevent me from recognising the quality of the writing, which is beyond dispute. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Capote was a master storyteller with a finely developed ear for dialogue and a massive flair for making the unglamorous glamorous. He used both gifts to great effect in Breakfast at Tiffany's, creating a story which, while less romantic and emotionally gratifying than the film adaptation, nevertheless succeeds in making the reader yearn for Holly the same way the narrator does. The prose is effortlessly elegant, even when it refers to ugly things, which it does rather more regularly than George Axelrod and Blake Edwards seem to have cared to replicate in the film. Timeless and evocative, it is a story about friendship valued and lost, about belonging and refusing to belong, and like the film, it stays with you as the perfect blend of cynicism and sentiment, with an added sense of loss. I can't think why I waited so long to read it...

The other three stories in the collection, 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory', are almost as strong as Breakfast at Tiffany's. Like the better-known novella which opens the book, 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory' are elegies on broken friendships, on bonds shared and then lost, and like °Õ¾±´Ú´Ú²¹²Ô²â’s, they are poignant and evocative, with moments of startling intimacy and many a well-turned phrase and eye-opening observation. 'House of Flowers' (about the romance between the most beautiful prostitute in Port-au-Prince and the peasant who makes an honest woman of her) is less poignant, but just as memorable for its matter-of-fact weirdness and quirkiness (spider bread, anyone?). All three short stories prove that Capote was a master of the genre, equally at home in first-person narratives and third-person ones, with male heroes and female ones, with child protagonists and more mature ones. The four stories contained in Breakfast at Tiffany's all have vastly different points of view, styles and subjects, but in their own ways, they are all interesting and memorable, making it all the more regrettable that Capote only published so few of them. He was obviously quite the short-story teller.

Do seek this collection out if you haven't already -- you won't regret it.