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Beautifully written, but not my cup of tea

Customer Rating:

Maybe I just have issues with the genre. Short stories can be unsatifying when they are left open ended. I am sure this is meant to leave us with a "what happened next?" feeling and that's supposed to be intriguing, but I just find it frustrating. But there is no denying that Capote's writing is vivid, beautiful and engrossing. He creates poetry from the mundane and perfectly captures the pathos and subtleties of the human condition.

Overrated

Customer Rating:

Of the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his renown) The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote, only two can be classified as great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent. Now, this ration of twenty and ten percent success in goodness and greatness is one that if it were sustained throughout published literature, would leave our time to be considered a Golden Age. However, since the only things I read of Capote's, before this book, were the excellent In Cold Blood, and the two Christmas tales, A Christmas Memory and One Christmas, this book's tales were a profound disappointment. More so considering the very two Christmas tales were the only arguably great tales, and the only good tales were also holiday stories: The Thanksgiving Visitor and Jug Of Silver. One might argue, from this quartet, that Capote was the greatest occasional short story writer of all time. The rest of his work, however, ranged from passable to atrocious....The two other Christmas tales are good, Jug Of Silver and One Christmas- which rivals its earlier, and more famous, Christmas predecessor, with an ending just as powerful, albeit less melancholy. That tale follows the same young boy alone on a trip to New Orleans to visit his absentee father, and his later recollections about what he missed out on during that trip- both then, and in the intervening time. The Thanksgiving Visitor is another very good story that follows Buddy, as he and Sook plan for a Great Depression era Thanksgiving. Sook invites an even poorer family to their home for supper, thinking a young boy, Odd Henderson, will make a good pal for Buddy. But, Odd has bullied Buddy at school and Buddy cannot stand him. He also feels jealousy over Sook's fussing over Odd's upcoming visit. When Odd comes he steals a brooch of Sook's and Buddy finks on him. Sook covers for Odd and explains that Buddy's intent to hurt Odd was worse than Odd's thievery borne of poverty. Years go by and Sook's kindness seems to have been a turning point in Odd's life, yet the tale is not moralistic, and succeeds with a sharp end. Capote died at the age of 59, in 1984, a withered shell who looked a good quarter century older- filled with hatred and spite, addicted to drugs and alcohol, yet somehow won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize for Shut A Final Door, one of his early pieces of dreck about a plagiarist. Yet, it is clear from this collection that the man simply was not adept with the form, save for a few pieces that could more easily be termed memoirs. The rest of the stories feature ill-formed characters that often veer into caricature, hazy premises and awfully contrived endings that ring too hollowly of artifice, and read like Southern Gothic lit lite. Fortunately, the short story form was merely a practice field for the too few greater works Capote would produce. Would that other writers' failures bore such bounty in other fields, Elysian or made of pulp.

Terminally brilliant

Customer Rating:

Because it is so well known and almost universally regarded as a masterpiece, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is the work with which most people are familiar. To judge the man's literary talents by that single book would leave him in great company, but tragically diminish his rare and spectacular ability to write in virtually any style with remarkable elegance. His collected short stories draw from the Gothic Southern tradition favored by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, with minimalist descriptions capable of evoking distinctive character voices, tactile sensations, and even smells. Anyone interested in writing should explore this collection, which will especially appeal to those of us who lament the decline of quality writing since home theaters replaced front porches as neighborhood gathering places. Capote is among the finest in a generation of great writers.

extraordinary small jewels

Customer Rating:

Truman Capote was a brilliant, eccentric novelist and author of a shocking at the time of its publication, documentary fiction book "In Cold Blood". And although he is famous for these works, his short stories are equally captivating and original. They are small masterpieces, weird and magnetizing. The protagonists are usually strange children (in his other works, Capote did not pay much attention to children), fascinating and different than adults, with their own world, dreams and agendas, or alienated, nerdish, unhappy adults, losers, who also have much of a child in them. Some of the protagonists are said to be modeled on the real people the author met during the course of his life, but some can be only attributed to his imagination... The world in the stories is only semi-realistic, like a dream, everything is wrapped in a fog of uncertainty. My favorite stories are " Children On Their Birthdays" (the longest of the stories, I think, and very well structured) where the life of a certain Miss Bobbitt, a girl of extraordinary discipline and set life goals, is abruptly ended by the afternoon bus; "Miriam" (which won The O'Henry Prize), where an elderly lady enters into a nightmare, after meeting at the cinema an angelic-looking little girl-demon, not to be able to get rid of her again (actually cost me some sleepless nights...); "Master Misery" about a mysterious New York City man, who buys people's dreams and a girl who gets addicted to dream-selling; and "A Tree of Night", about a dreary encounter on the train. The stories are spooky, but if analyzed, the events recalled may not have anything strange in them to the outside observer; yet the interpretation and way in which they are told suggest otherwise. These short stories show the other side of Capote's fiction and are a great round-up for anyone who wants to know his works thoroughly.

Not His Best, But. . .	Customer Rating:
These stories are not the best examples of Truman Capote's writing, but they are a good resource for tracking his development as a writer, leading up to the mastery of his "In Cold Blood" which, in my opinion, is one of the best books published in the latter part of the 20th century.