Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote* is one of those extremely elusive things: a beautiful book. You know I'd never throw around such florid praise without due justification. It's the kind of book that makes you think that if you could invite one person, living or dead, to dinner, it'd be Capote.
Briefly, it's about a boy of thirteen who's sent to live with the father who abandoned him, in the rural Louisiana of the 1940s. It's a story of loneliness and dissolution, and the search for happiness—the search for belonging.
I have two mind-blowing excerpts for you.
It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.
The whole novel seems to be written like this, but it's a delusion. There's a clean simplicity interwoven with this richness that catches readers off guard, plunging cool, hard knives into our hearts when we least expect it.
Overblown? Consider for yourself this example, presented as Joel steps outside on his first breathtakingly hot, deserted, abominably silent southern afternoon, having asked to see his father and received no response, and having seen no other living person in the dilapidated mansion for hours. He goes into the garden and finds himself immediately lathered in sweat. Says Capote:
It stood to reason such weather would have to break.
A curious line. Does it speak of the solace we take in logic? Or is it a plea for fairness in an unfair world—a gambler's prayer for clement odds regardless of the irrationality of nature, and of fate?
*Yes, mentioned before, and mind-blowing lines from his other books related earlier, and earlier still.
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