Breakfast at Tiffany´s by Truman Capote

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Breakfast at Tiffany´s by Truman Capote is one of those books I´ve read and heard so much about so that I thought I actually knew the whole story before I´d read it. But since everything I´ve ever read are praises it seemed to be a great idea to read the book and form my own opinion about it. Just to check if I agree with Sunday Times when they call Truman Capote "One of America´s best writers."

Truman Capote wrote the book in 1958 but it takes place in the early forties, in the city of New York. The storyteller is a young author called Buster, Capote never mentions his surname. Buster is the typical writer. He likes to sit in his small, gloomy apartment with its books and jars of pencils to sharpen and dream about the people that surround him and try to imagine what they do with their lives. He seems to have few friends, the only one mentioned in the book is Joe Bell. A man with an "uneasy nature" who´s building drinks at a bar on Lexington Avenue, just ´round the corner from the house where Buster lives. Buster use to visit the bar six, seven times a day. Not always for a drink, but to make telephone calls. Since there´s a war going on in the world a private telephone is hard to come by. Strange enough, this is the only place in the book you can notice the world war. Strange, I think, because I´ve read so many European books that take place during the war and where the war is constantly noticeable. I guess there were a great difference between living in Europe and in the states in those days.

Anyway… Buster has just been living in New York for about a week when he notices the mailbox belonging to apartment 2, the apartment below his own. On it, there´s a card, which read Miss Holiday Golightly, and underneath, in the corner, Travelling. That card is enough to make Buster´s thoughts start spinning around: Miss Holiday Golightly, Travelling…

Some weeks later he wakes up in the middle of the night at the sound of his doorbell. When he´s opening his door there´s a young woman, Miss Golightly, who´s calling up the stairs "Sorry, darling - I forgot my key". It´s nearly summer and she´s wearing a short black dress, black sandals and a pearl necklace. A pair of black glasses covers her eyes. "For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness". It´s hard to decide her age, Buster think her anywhere between sixteen and thirty. As it turned out, she was barley nineteen.

This is only the first time of many she calls to get Buster out of bed to push the buzzer that releases the door downstairs. She always calls late, sometimes at four in the morning. But Buster doesn´t mind. He finds Miss Golightly interesting and through the summer he gets to know a whole lot about her. By observing the trash-basket outside her door he finds out what she reads, what she smokes and what she eats.

An evening in September, when Buster is lying in his bed, reading a book and drinking whiskey there´s a knock on the window. It´s Miss Golightly sitting outside on the fire escape. "I´ve got the most terrifying man downstairs," she explains. "I´m sorry if I frightened you. But when the beast got so tiresome I just went out the window." Of course Buster lets her inside. He builds her a drink and they talk through the night. That´s the beginning of their friendship. Because, after all, they get friends.

Holly Golightly is a striking lady, very beautiful and in many ways very special. She seduces everyone that comes in her way, from Mafia gangsters to playboy millionaires. Me myself I most of all admire her language, the way she calls everyone darling. For example she calls Sally Tomato, the Mafia boss who Holly visit at Sing-sing every Thursday at ten o´clock, for a "darling old man".

She doesn´t have an ordinary job or an ordinary life at all. I´m not sure how she gets her money, she´s that kind of person who knows the right people and manage good by that. Or at least that what it seems like. Maybe she´s not doing so good that everybody think. Piece by piece we get to know the story of her nineteen years old life. She´s already got time to a lot of things. She was sent off to live in a foster-home after her parents had died in the TBC. Ran away together with her beloved brother Fred. Married by the age of thirteen. Ran away for the second time of her life. Was picked up by a Hollywood agent at the age of fifteen. Denied being the leading actress in a big Hollywood picture together with Cecil B. DeMille and went to New York instead, "cause she´d never been there". She truly is a fascinating woman.

So now she is in New York, but she knows she isn´t there to stay. It´s not hers. It´s not "the place where she and things belong together". She hasn´t found that place yet. But she knows what it is like: Tiffany´s, the jeweller´s at fifth avenue.

"You know those days when you´ve got the mean reds?"
"Same as the blues?"
"No," she [Holly] said slowly. "No the blues are because you´re getting fat or maybe it´s been raining too long. You´re sad, that´s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You´re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don´t know what you´re afraid of. /…/ What I found does the most good is to just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany´s. It calms me down right away."

A funny thing is that they never actually have breakfast at Tiffany´s. They talk about it, as you can see above, that´s all and that surprised me. The title on the book had mad me suggest long tea parties at the jeweller´s. The card on the mailbox (Miss Holiday Golightly, Travelling) is from there. Holly bought it since she felt she owed them to buy some little something. And Buster also buys her a Christmas gift there, a St Christopher´s medal.

I really liked the book, above all it´s language. I´d describe it as fast and flexible. Even though there are a lot of words that I didn´t understand the text flows over the pages. And among all the words that I had to look up in the dictionary I´ve found myself some new favourite English words: loathe, smirking and dreadful.

I´ve got my special favourite part from the text, it belongs to my favourite character. He´s called Doc Golightly, he´s a horse doctor, and he is Holly´s abandoned husband. He´s so sad so that you just have to like him. For five years he´s been waiting for his woman when, at last, he gets a message from Fred, Holly´s brother who´s in the army. The message says that Holly is in New York so Doc buys himself a ticket from Tulip, Texas, to The Great Apple to get his wife back where she belongs. Of course Holly doesn´t follow him back to the prairie, it´s not like Tiffany´s, it´s not wh...