In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

I’m not going to lie. If it weren’t for the love of Philip Seymour Hoffman, I don’t think I would have been all that interested in reading Truman Capote. Yes, I’ve seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s and even that didn’t pique my curiosity about his other works. However, Capote moved me and I loved it for being beautiful and ugly at the same time. It made me want to read the finished product of the obsession from both writer and murderer with telling their stories.

In Cold Blood is based on the true-to-life murders of prosperous Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, his wife and their two children by ex-cons Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. The novel takes us through the small town’s painful process of denial, grief and eventual justice, though not without giving the people involved a fair chance to explain themselves, including the murderers.

Capote takes painstaking care to show the reader everything. We are given a peek into the American pastoral that best described the Clutter family right up to the day of the murders: authoritative Herb and perfect little Nancy and Kenyon, both at the prime of their youth. The only shadow in their otherwise idyllic life was their mother who was always on the verge of mental breakdowns. She is seen hovering around the house and her family as a ghost, hidden in her upstairs bedroom.

The town sheriff, Alvin Dewey, is not spared the torments of having to solve the case without being consumed by the event and its corresponding aftermath. He takes the murders personally not only because his family and the Clutters were friends, but also the fact that the town he is in charge of, normally so calm and neighborly, is now turning upon itself. Everybody is starting to suspect everybody else, to the point of moving away. As a result, his own family life is disrupted.

The murderers, finally, are brought brilliantly forth, front and center, by Capote. I haven’t read much murder stories and so in my short experience with them, I must say that apart from Atwood’s Alias Grace (which I will be reviewing shortly), this is the only novel I’ve read that has paid attention to the murderers themselves. At the risk of being cliché, Hickock and Smith were made human to the readers, with childhoods and families that mirrored many others’. Smith was not the only abused child, nor was Hickock the only one with failed marriages. They were certainly not the only ones who have been in and out of jail. What gripped me is that showing us their histories was never for the purpose of doubting their guilt because they did murder that family, they were guilty and they did deserve to be hanged (following their laws). In fact, I very much doubt that Capote gave the murderers’ backgrounds for us to pity them rather than to show how masterfully he can tell the story, pointblank.

Despite his motives, Capote’s portraits of Hickock and Smith, along with everybody else’s, struck me personally as the turning of In Cold Blood into a reader-centric experience. I say this because it gave the reader a rare chance to participate in the text, what with evaluating the information provided and developing a personal judgment, meaning your impression of the novel could be the complete opposite of mine. What everyone is going to agree on, however, is the fact that Capote has laid out a chilling depiction of events as supported by an equally chilling language that will continue to raise questions for decades to come. I know for sure that Perry Smith, as characterized by the movie and the novel, will stay with me for a long, long time.

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The Name of the Rose

A few months ago, the company I work for had a beta-launch for this new social networking website. Every employee was required to sign up, and soon enough, everyone was busy making testimonials for everyone else. I suspect our office took a productivity hit during that period.

Anyway, my friend and then-officemate Wanggo, who would hopefully be contributing to this space soon, was getting tired of making witty write-ups for everyone, so he proceeded to give the rest of us one-word testimonials. When I opened mine up, it read, Erudite.

At the time, I had no idea what the word meant, so it was only when I looked the word up in the dictionary did the irony of what just happened dawn on me.

It was a good thing then that I already knew what the word meant when I picked up I read The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's international bestseller. Erudite is the perfect word to describe the book.

(A friend described another Eco book, Foucault's Pendulum, a "cerebral Dan Brown," which is probably fair, if you add, "Yeah, like a million times more.")

I suspect that Rose is one of those books that are read far fewer times than they are claimed to have been. To summarize quickly, it is a philosophical detective story set in an Italian monastery in the middle ages.

Now read that sentence again, and think about how ridiculous that sounds.

But Eco surprisingly pulls it off. Sure, there are parts that are hard to digest, but there are moments when I can't put the novel down. The book is a showcase not just for Eco's brilliant philosophical mind, but his remarkable ability to do an exciting facsimile of an Arthur Conan Doyle plot.

Postscript: I wasn't aware that there was a film based on the book as I was reading it, but all the while, I was imagining William as a Sean Connery-type. I wasn't that surprised when I found out that Connery did play him in the movie.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Two critics have dubbed this novel the perfect thing to read at the beach. Before delving into the story, however, I would just like to ask: What qualities must a book possess to be considered “beach material?” I once brought Kostova’s The Historian to the beach and it wasn’t a very good decision because, however average that novel turned out to be, I ended up stealing into our hotel room every chance I could get because I was afraid of being chased by vampires. That being said, here is what I think beach reading should be like:

1. Not too absorbing because if you can’t put a book down, then you shouldn’t have gone to the beach in the first place. It isn’t to say, however, that beach reading should be dull. Hopefully you know what I mean.  
2. Easy in the sense that you can take it up again and again and be able to pick up the pace from where you left off, in between distractions.
3. If possible, it must contain a fair amount of references to food and drink, in order to whet one’s appetite, which makes #2 very important.

(Off the top of my head: Fitzgerald, Fforde, Murdoch, Winterson… feel free to add to it)

So. Notes on a Scandal.

Set in London, we meet Barbara Covett, a single and newly-retired schoolteacher of favorable repute who takes friendship very seriously. Having previously been burned by a friend who thought she was too clingy, Barbara has spent the latter half of her teaching career shunning co-workers she thought were too beneath her. In between her job and her life at home (with nobody but a cat to keep her company), she thrived on scheduled trips to the grocery and other errands. When Bathsheba Hart came to St. George’s to teach pottery, it became Barbara’s mission to take her in and, what with her gauzy outfits and problematic children ensconced in a huge house, Sheba exuded a tragic glamour that Barbara wanted in on.

The novel is about Barbara’s chronicling Sheba’s affair with a student, the news of which turns her into an object of national scandal. Barbara shows an obsessive (to the point of being manipulative), detailing of the rise and decline of the illicit “romance,” and her efforts to protect Sheba by moving in with her, making sure she’s bathed and fed, etc. As one reads further, it is Barbara who dominates the novel, over and above the sexual encounters between Sheba and her student. Sheba’s downfall is Barbara’s triumph – her gaining not a friend but someone utterly dependent on her, something she welcomes all too eagerly.

I enjoyed the book for a number of reasons, the first of which is Barbara’s character. Initially pitiful, she turns out to be the stronger figure in the end, however evil. She reminds me of Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery: consumed with good intentions but on a psychotic level. Even the language used in the novel is very characteristic of Barbara – smart and biting. Particularly memorable to me is the part where Barbara goes to Sheba’s house for the first time. She chooses her outfit meticulously and even buys new shoes for the occasion but it ends embarrassingly, with her foot bleeding amidst Sheba’s amusement and Polly’s (Sheba’s daughter) disgust.

As mentioned earlier, I enjoyed the language in which Heller wrote the novel. It is full of little tirades on relationships, youth and sexuality. In this passage, she scoffs at “regular” females:

In my experience, newcomers – particularly female ones – are far too eager to pin their colours to the mast of any staffroom coterie that will have them …

She scoffs at house décor:

Hanging on the wall were several paintings – the sort of gimmicky modern abstracts that aren’t my cup of tea – and a primitive wooden instrument, possibly African, which looked as if it might be rather smelly if one got too close to it. The bookshelves housed a decent but not very inspired collection of fiction, suggesting the strong influence of newspaper “Books of the Year” lists. You could tell there weren’t any real literature lovers in the family. The mantelpiece was a gathering point for household flotsam. A child’s drawing. A hunk of pink Play-Doh. A passport. One elderly banana.

Notes on a Scandal is an unassuming but strangely charming novel. I was a bit skeptical at first because it just came with a three-piece set and truth be told, I would never have cast a second glance at it if I saw it at the bookstore, not even if I saw that it was shortlisted by the Man Booker Prize 2003 (which it was). I’m glad I was wrong.

So, is it perfect beach reading material? You bet.