Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kudos to Michael C. Hall, the actor known for his role as Dexter Morgan in the Showtime TV Network series Dexter, for excellent narration in this audiobook. I don't often read fiction and came to this book for two reasons: (1) I was reminded of Tru by all the resurgent To Kill a Mockingbird attention, and (2) I wanted to compare to the Audrey Hepburn movie. Well, and this may be blasphemy - but Capote's novella here is just plain better than To Kill a Mockingbird let alone Go Set a Watchman, for my money. Also, from all that Harper Lee attention I had recalled Tru was Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird and I would say in Holly Golightly I feel he is much there, expressing the fusion of coarse country child and want-to-be big city personage. This comes across more in the book, since it is Holly's eruptions of rural swearing and crude metaphors that is largely gone from the movie. Lulamae Barnes is close to the surface in the book than in the movie. The movie's ending where Cat is abandoned in an alley is resolved quickly in the movie, but as a visual it affected me more strongly than in the book, where weeks are taken to reclaim the unlucky animal. I couldn't have taken it, but I am glad the easily delivered racist slurs are largely foregone for the film.

Like The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, the book's Paul is more of a disinterested observer. Paul is gay? I missed that. I guess that is why they had to amp up the hetero by making him a kept man with a sugar mama - or was he a gigolo? The major addition to the screenplay is that the hero becomes a kept man to the character of Patricia Neal's decorator, nowhere to be found in the book. Hollywood convention demanded the hero should be more interested in girls than in his writing, or men. However, this crowds the film with New Yorkers taking money for their company, IMO. I like the book's presentation better. Paul is there to narrate and react to Holly, his personal life is not needed.

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