My Side of the Matter (Pocket Penguins 70's) [Paperback]

This slim book contains three of Capote's short stories, each one showing off a different facet of his talent. Miriam, a ghostly story about a widow and a child, is one of Capote's earliest and best short stories.
My Side of the Matter is a funny tale about a young newly wed who is forced to live with two Aunt-in-laws. Written in the vein of J.D. Salinger it's surprisingly masculine for Capote, but is still recognisably his because of the pitch-perfect quality of the description.
Music for Chameleons is something he wrote later on in his career and is not so much a short story as a portrait, rather like his famous one of Marlon Brando.

Truman Capote's short stories are consistantly good and are definitely on a par with his best fiction writing (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Other Voices Other Rooms). If you like the three contained in this book then it's worth getting his Complete Short Stories.

This is a `taster' book put out by Penguin and offered for free with copies of The Times newspaper a few years ago and is a collection of four short stories by Truman Capote that comprises the following:

MIRIAM - Miriam Miller is a recently widowed woman who meets a young girl at the cinema who happens to share her name. A momentary act of kindness by Mrs Miller to the girl results in her barging into her life and threatening to take it over. This was my favourite in the collection as it works both as a paranormal story and a psychological character examination and there's a really eerie feel to it right up until the final pay-off.

MY SIDE OF THE MATTER - the 16-year-old narrator recounts his side of the events of Sunday 12th August, when, he claims, his teenage wife's aunts tried to kill him. It's supposed to be a humorous tale, but the humour wasn't to my taste and while the characters are neatly observed and depicted, the general all-round unpleasantness prevented me from really enjoying it.

MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS - the narrator is visiting an elderly, chic woman in Martinique to discuss mutual friends and shared experiences. It's a well-written story but absolutely nothing happens in it, which meant that my interest started to wane towards the end.

MR JONES - the narrator reminisces about a neighbour of his from 1945, a blind and crippled man called Mr Jones who used to listen to the neighbourhood's problems. It's a really short story and the central twist didn't work for me at all, feeling like more of a tack-on than anything meaningful.

All in all, it's worth checking out for MIRIAM and to see how Capote sketches out character, but if you're like me and prefer short stories that focus on plot, then it's likely to be a little frustrating.

Truman Capote is one of those authors that I keep meaning to get around to, but never quite manage it. However, I finally broke my duck, albeit in a tiny way.

For Christmas 2005 I was given the box set of the slim little Penguin Pocket 70s books they released to celebrate their 70th birthday, which contains - as I'm sure you all know - 70 little books by Penguin authors of all vintages and genres. The box set is something I dip into every so often, and after a prolonged perios of finding it difficult to settle on anything, I picked a "70" at random and ended up opening My Side of the Matter, a collection of four short stories by Mr Capote.

The first story in the collection is, IMHO, by far the best. 'Miriam' is a ghost story, or perhaps ghostly story, about a widow (Mrs Miller) who lives alone, and a strange little girl called Miriam who starts turning up uninvited at Mrs Miller's apartment.

At first glance the writing seems to break every single "rule" of what constitutes "good writing": lots of descriptions of physical appearance and short sentences. But it all seems to work somehow. The simplicity of the (very) short story is actually what makes it quite disturbing:

"The other people in the house never seemed to notice [Mrs Miller]: her clothes were matter-of-fact, her hair iron-gray, clipped and casually waved; she did not use cosmetics, her features were plain and inconspicuous, and on her last birthday she was sixty-one. Her activities were seldom spontaneous: she kept the two rooms immaculate, smoked an occasional cigarette, prepared her own meals and tended a canary.
Then she met Miriam."

For all that I've read a lot about Truman Capote's real life gregarious personality, he manages to not be detectable in the story at all... there are now judgements, there is no defined moral viewpoint, if that makes sense. 'Miriam' is a fantastic little story.

The second story is the 'My Side of the Matter' from which the collection gets its title. This is much more playful, and I could see Capote having some fun with the protagonist, a recently married teenager whose pregnant wife wants them to move in with her spinster aunts in a small American town/village/house in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness. The two aunts detest him and don't even let him share a bedroom with his wife, instead making him sleep in a cot on the back porch:

"May, June and July and the best part of August I've squatted and sweltered one that damn back porch without an ounce of screening. And Marge - she hasn't opened her mouth in protest, not once!"

And this seems to be when the switch comes between our narrator being someone who is cocky, sure, but who I ultimately felt sorry for - he had to give up his "perfectly swell" job at a cash n carry to live with these two cartoonish harridans - into a young man who is bitter, twisted, and not a little malevolent. His language about his wife becomes more and more offensive, and he tries to blackmail until all descends into violence. Of course, his "side of the matter" is that he is perfectly innocent, but it's plain that that's not what Capote wants us to think.

It's another accomplished story, though completely different to 'Miriam'. The other two pieces are less stories that portraits: one of an elderly woman in Martinique talking to an American tourist called 'Music for Chameleons', and another about a mysterious cripple who is perhaps not what he seems, 'Mr Jones'.

As a taster of Capote's writing, I think it's a very well put together little package, and if the rest of his writing is anywhere near as good then sign me up as a fan now.