Breakfast at Tiffany's

This review shall comprise of the penguin classics edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's, so you'll get a bonus review of the three short stories contained alongside Truman Capote's famous novella. Breakfast at Tiffany's is the story of Holly Golightly (who I should point out is not Audrey Hepburn, fact fans may be interested to know Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the lead role in the film adaptation…although I can't honestly imagine Monroe as Golightly either) Holly Golightly is 19 and lives alone in an apartment in New York with a cat. She's kind of like a socialite who makes 100 dollars a week visiting Sally Tomato (a mobster) in prison and relaying his "weather reports" to his lawyer (these are obviously not weather reports but somewhat more underhand information) she's not quite what she seems and there's a little bit of fleeing the country towards the end. Similar to the great gatsby her story is narrated by a character we don't learn a great deal about. I quite like that way of doing things, actually there is a touch of the Fitzgeralds about Capote I think, and there are shades of similarity between the characters Gatsby and Golightly. I loved Holly Golightly, she's exactly my kind of character, a bit complex, her own person and with a good turn of phrase. There where a couple of major themes to this story, or that's what I got from it anyway, to do with freedom and that wild things, or free spirits (in the case of people) can't be tamed or changed or stifled or they'll fly away. And also "not knowing whats yours until you've thrown it away". Both these things are things I think about occasionally so that's perhaps why this book has struck a bit of a chord with me. As for the other stories in the edition I read, the first was called House of Flowers which I liked the least out of the three and I have nothing terribly interesting to say about it, not that it was bad by any stretch of the imagination just it didn't really grab me like the other two. The second was called A Diamond Guitar, this was set in a prison with an old respected inmate more or less falling for Tico Fey a new and younger prisoner both in an intimate and platonic way. It's really quite a sad story about love and in some sense betrayal, however it's the last of the short stories that'll actually incite tears. This one called A Christmas Memory is about the friendship between a 7 year old boy and his much older relative. Despite being very poor every christmas make fruitcakes for their friends (which are essentially strangers, brief acquaintances they've met once or twice), they also exchange homemade gifts, which the year our narrator, the boy, is reminiscing about was kites. This was the last christmas they spent together as the next year the boy was sent to military school, they remain in contact via letter and it is through this Capote conveys dementia and loneliness in as poignant a way as i've read. It's maybe ten pages long but it knocked me over all the same.