Certainly Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, “a stylist of the first quality.” But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to the author’s last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered “Remembering Willa Cather,” Portraits and Observations puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote’s brilliance. Included are such masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as “The Muses Are Heard” and the short nonfiction novel “Handcarved Coffins,” as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. His openly expressed homosexuality (during a time when many gay people remained in the closet for fear of being ostracized), wit. Bitter public feuds with contemporaries such as Jackie Onassis, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal made Capote more than an author. Aesthetics are all but lost amid politics and egoes. The books title comes from a speech given by one of the Soviet cultural ministry staff, who declared, When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent. Truman Capote was one of the most notorious writers of his time. Portraits and Observations is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. The muses are heard by Truman Capote, 1958, Random House edition, in English. The Muses Are Heard is Truman Capote's ironic, true-life account of following the Everyman Opera Company's journey to the Soviet Union for a production of the Gershwin opera, 'Porgy and Bess,' during the most frigid part of the Cold War. Perhaps no twentieth-century writer was so observant and graceful a chronicler of his times as Truman Capote.
0 kommentar(er)
