It only took moments to hook me. The first paragraph of Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's aptly foreshadows the intoxicating sensory imagery that distinguishes the text, making it a story I have returned to again and again:
"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years if the war, I had my first New York apartment," he opens. "With all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be."
I was given my copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's as a gift for my 16th birthday. It was a text I would return to again and again. The visceral experience I had upon first encountering the text was intense: I was thrilled by feeling the slim volume in my hand, its slight weight pressing into my palms. A paper jacket enwrapped the hard cover and spine, gold-leafed letters pronounced its title. It was a brand new book, its pages still smelled inky and felt crisp.
When I first read Breakfast at Tiffany's, I knew very little about its actual plot. The only familiarity I had with the story was the knowledge that it was a movie -- which I had never seen -- starring Audrey Hepburn and a very long, black cigarette holder. The presence of the unknown surrounded the text and made it all the more intriguing. The very day I had received the book, I stayed up all night to read the novella in its entirety.
Breakfast at Tiffany's gave me a wonderful protagonist to mull over in Holly Golightly. To this day, I simultaneously feel like I understand Holly at her core and that I will never be able to peel back enough of the crust to expose the "real" Holly. She is wholly objectified by her setting - she is that which is desired, though I am unsure what her identity might be outside that realm of want.
The narrator's first encounter with Holly aptly captures this problem: he learns of Holly though the label on her mailbox in the apartment building. "Rather Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner, Traveling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling." It nagged me like a tune, too, this woman embodied by the words and images associated with her.
It nagged me like a tune in other ways, as well. There is a distinct musicality to Capote's text; phrases and sentences take on a life of their own merely through the aural sensation which they yield. The narrator's description of Holly is a most pleasing passage.
"I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced," it reads. "The same source made it apparent that she received V-letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and <I>please write and damn and goddamn were the words that occurred most often on these slips; those and lonesome and love."
The sensory imagery conjured by the text is intoxicating, lulling the reader into the story and the world of Holly and her admirers.
Perhaps the most rewarding part of Breakfast at Tiffany's is its ending, which ends as enigmatically as its protagonist's characterization demands. The ending is complete in its lack of completion: It is most appropriate that the plot refuses to yield to traditional standards of closure.
I became acutely aware of the appropriateness of the novella's ending when I finally saw the film version: Though you will find me hard-pressed to say anything negative about Hepburn and her Givenchy costumes, the movie left me longing for the novella and its words. While the film presents completion as kissing-in-a-downpour, the novel's ending is superior. It reads, "I wondered what [Holly's cat] name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too." I'll take words that hope for belonging over embracing to Mancini music anyday.
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