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Title: A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & the Thanksgiving Visitor
Author: Truman Capote
Genre: Semi-autobiographical holiday themed short stories
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Three short stories about Capote's childhood holidays in rural Alabama during the Great Depression.
Thoughts: I'd read "A Christmas Memory" several times before, having been giving a copy as a gift as a teenager. The other two stories are in a similar vein--ostensibly about a specific holiday, more specifically about growing up, the innocent cruelty of children, and the bittersweetness of looking back with adult eyes.
It's an odd mixture, in which the subject matter is unsophisticated and childish and the writing is anything but. Capote writes about being so poor that the only present he can give his best friend is a homemade kite each year and that shoes are an unfamiliar burden. His best friend, an elderly cousin, is clearly mentally disabled in some way. It's a subject that, for a now-grown New York intellectual, could easily become condescending or maudlin. But Capote's prose skips so lightly, so gently over the surface that while all the depths are hinted at, he never falls. His childhood is at once deeply painful, ignorant, full of bullying and oppression and at the same time, nostalgic and beloved. His ambivalence, his love for his friend, his nostalgic delight at tiny pleasures keeps these stories sophisticated and bittersweet without betraying their roots. It's perfect, and I can think of few writers who could pull off such a balancing act.
Author: Truman Capote
Genre: Semi-autobiographical holiday themed short stories
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Three short stories about Capote's childhood holidays in rural Alabama during the Great Depression.
Thoughts: I'd read "A Christmas Memory" several times before, having been giving a copy as a gift as a teenager. The other two stories are in a similar vein--ostensibly about a specific holiday, more specifically about growing up, the innocent cruelty of children, and the bittersweetness of looking back with adult eyes.
It's an odd mixture, in which the subject matter is unsophisticated and childish and the writing is anything but. Capote writes about being so poor that the only present he can give his best friend is a homemade kite each year and that shoes are an unfamiliar burden. His best friend, an elderly cousin, is clearly mentally disabled in some way. It's a subject that, for a now-grown New York intellectual, could easily become condescending or maudlin. But Capote's prose skips so lightly, so gently over the surface that while all the depths are hinted at, he never falls. His childhood is at once deeply painful, ignorant, full of bullying and oppression and at the same time, nostalgic and beloved. His ambivalence, his love for his friend, his nostalgic delight at tiny pleasures keeps these stories sophisticated and bittersweet without betraying their roots. It's perfect, and I can think of few writers who could pull off such a balancing act.
