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A review by dyno8426
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
4.0
Truman Capote has plotted out one of the most infamous murders in the history of Southern American criminal landscape by adopting the form and style of a fictional mystery throughout the narrative. And I especially liked it for the way it engages its readers - the descriptive element is so thorough and so well-written that I did not realise it was a true account from the period around 1960s when it happened until I noticed the referential nature of the text at many points - instances quoting real interviews and historical accounts of both the victim and criminal party involved. The author uses his imagination to remove the documentary-feeling aspects from this narrative by going "beyond the facts".
This obviously involves trying to imagine the interactions among people of which there would never be any proof whatsoever. And I appreciate the result of this attempt, the primary being studying the scarring effect this mass murder of the Clutter family created in the otherwise peaceful small farming town of Holcombe. By going "beyond the facts" in his narration, the author brings character depth and perspective of the criminals which tends to get overlooked by the immediate reactions of horror and hatred upon hearing the incident, and which naturally gets overshadowed by our emotional thirst for vengeance and simple notions of morality. The really appreciable part of the story lies in an analysis of the psyche of criminals: the extremes of feelings like insecurity and bitterness for the world around one which can make a person care less about anyone's life, and least about his/her own. The title of the story centrally captures the need to understand how isolation and rebellion are vented out through recklessness in simpler crimes; and sometimes the most chilling and horrifying crimes are unmeditated and spontaneous, seemingly "in cold blood". This historical account through such a form achieves in evoking an empathy even for cold-blooded criminals like Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock and a cry-for-help owing to their circumstances which dented their psychological characters and led them to cross that threshold into an hateful abyss of no-return.
For the same purpose of humanising the characters, the chilly "thrill" of the real murder occupies quite a small portion of the story, but instead gives accounts of real psychological analyses that came out after this event came into light nationally and eventually, globally. It challenges the righteousness and the effective success of capital punishment and judicial system - when and how much it does/does not try to accommodate the correction in these destructive outliers of human behaviour - if human society is capable of breeding such bitterness among its individuals, then shouldn't it try to remove it by facing it instead of trying to eliminate it? Questions regarding penalising the act of taking someone's life by taking the criminal's life and higher theological, Christian notions also eventually decide the fate of the two infamous murderers in this story. Various other heinous crimes around the same time try to show the criminal sketch of those who committed them by seeing beyond the judgements made and sentences served. On the other hand, the murder also violates a feeling of sacred and safety which one associates with good moral behaviour, as the accounts and reactions of town-people reflect in the story.
What probably best describes the book is a comment that I found at the back of my edition - "an American dream... turning into an American nightmare". It conveys the same shivery realisation of this being a world where anyone can become anything - a successful respected farmer, or a dangerously infamous criminal.
This obviously involves trying to imagine the interactions among people of which there would never be any proof whatsoever. And I appreciate the result of this attempt, the primary being studying the scarring effect this mass murder of the Clutter family created in the otherwise peaceful small farming town of Holcombe. By going "beyond the facts" in his narration, the author brings character depth and perspective of the criminals which tends to get overlooked by the immediate reactions of horror and hatred upon hearing the incident, and which naturally gets overshadowed by our emotional thirst for vengeance and simple notions of morality. The really appreciable part of the story lies in an analysis of the psyche of criminals: the extremes of feelings like insecurity and bitterness for the world around one which can make a person care less about anyone's life, and least about his/her own. The title of the story centrally captures the need to understand how isolation and rebellion are vented out through recklessness in simpler crimes; and sometimes the most chilling and horrifying crimes are unmeditated and spontaneous, seemingly "in cold blood". This historical account through such a form achieves in evoking an empathy even for cold-blooded criminals like Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock and a cry-for-help owing to their circumstances which dented their psychological characters and led them to cross that threshold into an hateful abyss of no-return.
For the same purpose of humanising the characters, the chilly "thrill" of the real murder occupies quite a small portion of the story, but instead gives accounts of real psychological analyses that came out after this event came into light nationally and eventually, globally. It challenges the righteousness and the effective success of capital punishment and judicial system - when and how much it does/does not try to accommodate the correction in these destructive outliers of human behaviour - if human society is capable of breeding such bitterness among its individuals, then shouldn't it try to remove it by facing it instead of trying to eliminate it? Questions regarding penalising the act of taking someone's life by taking the criminal's life and higher theological, Christian notions also eventually decide the fate of the two infamous murderers in this story. Various other heinous crimes around the same time try to show the criminal sketch of those who committed them by seeing beyond the judgements made and sentences served. On the other hand, the murder also violates a feeling of sacred and safety which one associates with good moral behaviour, as the accounts and reactions of town-people reflect in the story.
What probably best describes the book is a comment that I found at the back of my edition - "an American dream... turning into an American nightmare". It conveys the same shivery realisation of this being a world where anyone can become anything - a successful respected farmer, or a dangerously infamous criminal.