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Other Voices, Other Rooms
by Truman Capote
This review won’t be very long, I find, more than anything, the pandemic’s sort of left me without words.
I read this book for my 20th century queer project, a project where I read 100+ books, one for each year of the 20th century. This was my book for 1948.
I want to use all the adjectives to describe this book. Lush, beautiful, sensual, hot, sticky, Gothic, queer, but I find that a lot of the adjectives I reach for fall short. His command of his work really is exemplary. I listened to this on audio (the narrator had a Southern drawl, which helped rather deliciously) but I wish I’d had a physical copy so I could go back and reread passages and pick them apart. His strength, in writing, is not the individual words, but the feeling his words leave you with.
Capote’s writing is so delicate. Joel Knox, his 13-year-old partially autobiographical protagonist, is fine-boned, beautiful and tells wild, wild stories. And who can forget Skully’s Landing, a dilapidated Alabama mansion and a character all in itself? So evocative, so atmospheric. I found myself wanting to listen to this every day, looking forward to listening to it every day and thinking, I’ll just read a little more. It was rather hypnotising.
Often when choosing books for this project, I wonder if the book is actually queer, or if it is just written by a queer author. But it was perfectly, perfectly queer.
Capote’s writing reminds me of something, makes me nostalgic, but I don’t know what for. It was all at once strange, but familiar.
When I found out Capote had spoken about his experience writing the novel in the November 1967 Harper’s magazine, I had to find the article. With my friend Erik’s help, I slipped under that paywall and pulled this quotation.
"Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole Look. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lightning that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with figures, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must soothe and tame it.”
This would be good to read beside To Kill a Mockingbird, as one of the characters, Idabel, a rambunctious tomboy, is based off Harper Lee. Both books have the idea to tear apart the fabric of how racist America is, while leaving black characters with futures so bleak, so depressing, so dismal that one has to wonder if the telling of the story isn’t harmful in and of itself. Not to mention, the fact that my 20th century queer project really should be called 100+ books, mostly by cis white men that feature gay coming of age stories, but is that title too long?
This book is so gristly, gruelling, but so beautifully written, difficult to review! I'll see if I can come back to it and do it justice later.
tw: racial slurs, gun violence, mention of past trauma
I read this book for my 20th century queer project, a project where I read 100+ books, one for each year of the 20th century. This was my book for 1948.
I want to use all the adjectives to describe this book. Lush, beautiful, sensual, hot, sticky, Gothic, queer, but I find that a lot of the adjectives I reach for fall short. His command of his work really is exemplary. I listened to this on audio (the narrator had a Southern drawl, which helped rather deliciously) but I wish I’d had a physical copy so I could go back and reread passages and pick them apart. His strength, in writing, is not the individual words, but the feeling his words leave you with.
Capote’s writing is so delicate. Joel Knox, his 13-year-old partially autobiographical protagonist, is fine-boned, beautiful and tells wild, wild stories. And who can forget Skully’s Landing, a dilapidated Alabama mansion and a character all in itself? So evocative, so atmospheric. I found myself wanting to listen to this every day, looking forward to listening to it every day and thinking, I’ll just read a little more. It was rather hypnotising.
Often when choosing books for this project, I wonder if the book is actually queer, or if it is just written by a queer author. But it was perfectly, perfectly queer.
Capote’s writing reminds me of something, makes me nostalgic, but I don’t know what for. It was all at once strange, but familiar.
When I found out Capote had spoken about his experience writing the novel in the November 1967 Harper’s magazine, I had to find the article. With my friend Erik’s help, I slipped under that paywall and pulled this quotation.
"Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole Look. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lightning that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with figures, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must soothe and tame it.”
This would be good to read beside To Kill a Mockingbird, as one of the characters, Idabel, a rambunctious tomboy, is based off Harper Lee. Both books have the idea to tear apart the fabric of how racist America is, while leaving black characters with futures so bleak, so depressing, so dismal that one has to wonder if the telling of the story isn’t harmful in and of itself. Not to mention, the fact that my 20th century queer project really should be called 100+ books, mostly by cis white men that feature gay coming of age stories, but is that title too long?
This book is so gristly, gruelling, but so beautifully written, difficult to review! I'll see if I can come back to it and do it justice later.
tw: racial slurs, gun violence, mention of past trauma