"Breakfast at Tiffany's"

[fiefoe]

Truman Capote certainly knew how to build up mystique. Where else do you have a main character first surface as an eagerly scrutinized photograph of an African statue? Such was her spell that looking at the photograph, Joe Bell the barkeep let slip, "I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl that walks fast and straight-"

When Holly Golightly finally showed up in person, we heard her voice first, 'silly-young and self-amused'. And I'd be hard-pressed to think of a female voice in fiction as vivid as this: (though Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle" should perhaps get an honorable mention.)

• "I worship you, Mr. Arbuck. But good night, Mr. Arbuck."
• "I've got a gall barging in on you like this."
  
• "I suppose you think I'm very brazen. Or très fou. Or something." "Not at all." She seemed disappointed. "Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don't mind. It's useful." 
• "I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did."
  
• " It's different afterwards," she said. "I see them on the train. They sit so quiet watching the river go by."
  
• "Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid."
  
• "I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along."
  
• She rubbed her nose. "That's true. The other isn't. But really, darling, you made such a tragedy out of your childhood I didn't feel I should compete."
  
• "Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege."
  

I first watched the Audrey Hepburn movie in my mid-teens and didn't get it. Two things I vaguely remember about Holly: that she often woke up her neighbors to let her in because she forgot her keys, and that she instigated a masked theft at the Woolworth's. To me back then, she was just an adult who didn't behave well. It's quite a shock to read from the book that she was 19 for the main part.