Breakfast at Tiffany's: & Other Voices, Other Rooms - Two Novels (Modern Library)

This Modern Library of The World's Best Books combines two works from Truman Capote.The first Breakfast at Tiffany's is an acknowledged classic. A young would-be author encounters a free spirit, chaotic, freewheeling but with a basic code of conduct, and who poses him, and us all, questions about the right way to live.The second, Other Voices Other Rooms, was Capote's first published novel. It too has some fine writing and some fine scenes, as a 13 year old on the verge of adolescence goes to live with his father and a group of, once again, very entertaining and interesting misfits or apparent misfits. If I enjoyed it much less, that is probably because the plot is, once again, episodic, but episodic at greater length, and because I found some of the episodes started to pall. However, there is also much here that I did enjoy...

I read Breakfast at Tiffany's many years ago and promptly went through a 'Capote phase' reading everything he had written and everything about him. Inevitably my passion burned itself out and his books remained on my shelves - never to be thrown away. But then I realised I had lent Breakfast at Tiffany's to a friend and never got it back (never lend books!) and I decided to order this copy to set things right.And of course I dipped in to it when it arrived and then more or less read it in one sitting. It all came back to me - Capote once again wove his spell. It is a masterpiece - nothing more nothing less.