Nice to meet you Mr. Capote by Francisco Vaz Brasil

Nice to meet you Mr. Capote by Francisco Vaz Brasil

“Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”

“Queenie has scooted to bury her bone (and where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried, too.”

“I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord.”

“I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

“That is why, walking across a school campus, on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”

Truman Capote,  A Christmas Memory

    Imagine a morning in late November. Imagine that it's fruitcake weather! Imagine the leaves falling from the trees. Imagine snow over the plants, cars, houses, roads and the snow falling in your ways! Imagine the emotion of these visions! 

   In a certain day of 2008, my teacher of American Literature, Maria Clara Mattos, showed me a text by Truman Capote - A Christmas Memory. I read it carefully. Reread it more four times. And each time that I read it, I felt more interest by the works written by Truman Capote. Capote is an icon of the letters of the United States. Capote knew actually mount the board of words, with the simplicity of a master. The text of Capote is fine, clear, dry and is lyric, like a poem. After A Chistmas Memory was in search of the other works by Capote. Sensational. I got him some books and I have received the influence of Professor Maria Clara. A Christmas Memory is to be read by all who have the opportunity to read in English and to feel the purest emotion and assess the  sensitivity.

     A Christmas Memory was issued by Random House in 1966 during the holiday season in order to capitalize on Truman Capote's growing popularity following the release of his true-crime novel, In Cold Blood. Though A Christmas Memory had initially appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in December, 1956, and was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, it was the 1966 edition that established the story's enduring popularity. Also this short story appear in Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the edition of 1994. The story of a seven-year-old boy and his aging cousin's holiday traditions was made into an Emmy Award-winning television movie starring Geraldine Page in 1968 and continues to be produced by high-school and regional theaters throughout the United States.

Truman Capote drew on his own youthful experience in rural Alabama to write A Christmas Memory. This story, which he called his personal favorite, is an idealized recollection of one of the few relatively secure periods of his unstable early childhood.

     A Christmas Memory is a holiday classic. It's the autobiographical account of a simpler Christmas celebration.

     Buddy is a young boy living with elderly relatives. He and his friend, a distant cousin in her 60s, hoard pennies to buy the ingredients for fruitcakes to give as gifts. They make kites for each other. Despite her fragil condition, they go out to dut down a Christmas tree, accompanied by their dog.

     The story can be called as the fiction of nostalgia, in accordance to William L. Nance in The Worlds of Truman, in which Capote looks back fondly upon his Southern childhood. These nostalgic stones evoke a gentle, simple, and secure childhood uncorrupted by the complications of adulthood. Autobiographical elements in A Christmas Memory are apparent: Capote lived with relatives in the South as a child, and during this time his older female cousin, the childlike Sook Faulk, was his closest companion. The nostalgic mood has prompted some critics to dismiss the story as "saccharine." However, the story also contains darker elements such as loneliness, poverty, social isolation, and death, which demonstrate that the innocence of childhood may protect young people from the elements of the human condition, but not remove them from it. The story is also an example of a common theme in Capote's writings: the friendship forged among social outcasts, many of which are eccentric women.

     Truman Capote left us the finest and best literature in short stories and novellas which are: Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his first novel and a classic Southern Gothic, is the story of a young boy's painful search for identity. His other works include a gentle autobiographical novel, The Grass Harp (1951); a collection of short stories, A Tree of Night (1949); the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) a best-seller that makes a lot of success in the movie starring my dear Audrey Hepburn; a report of his trip to Russia with the cast of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, The Muses Are Heard (1956); the musical House of Flowers (1954); and two collections of nonfiction pieces, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). In 1966, Capote published his "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood, a chilling account of the senseless, brutal murder of a Kansas family that is widely considered his finest work. Fragments of his last major book, the unfinished Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, were collected in 1990. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote was published in 2004. 

   According to A&E, “the diminutive Truman Capote is one of the literary giants of the twentieth century, but he is even more famous for his public persona. Capote's classics, such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood became huge bestsellers and motion pictures.”

   Mr. Capote left us fine and clean works and I consider him one of the best American writters of all times.