Disturbingly true, amazingly written, incredibly touching. This is a book that makes you think, about the past, about the human mind, about justice. The story? The multiple murder of the Clutter family in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas. The book is a thoughtful and deep reflection on this family's last day, and Capote crosscuts between them and the planning of the murder by Richard "Dick" Hickcock and Perry Smith. It took Capote six years to complete the it, and it immediately gained a huge success. It's Capote's first non-fiction book, and it asks its readers to think about some universal questions: What leads two young men to plan and kill an entire family without knowing it? What lies behind the human psyche? And, above all, aren't we all guilty in some way?
Favourite quotes:
“It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.”
“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ”
“As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.”
“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction."
“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
“The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.”
“I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.”
“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”
Leonard Cohen is one of those artists who can do pretty much everything: singer, song-writer, poet, and writer. One of the aspects I love the most about his art is that both his music and novels think about the boundaries between sacre and profane. His art sounds like an eternal Hallelujah and Beautiful Losers, his second novel, is a very good example of this. I'll write one of the statements written behind my book's cover: "A tale of religious obsession, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint, its transcendence lies in its humanism; it is the lesson of what happens when the sacred infects the human, when a lust for the unattainable trumps he will to love a person." I couldn't find better and more concise words to explain it. We should not forget that it is also a very complex book in its writing style, but this doesn't stop the reader from loving every single page and feeling the widest range of emotions at the same time.
Favourite quotes:“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”
“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
“Do not be a magician - be magic!”
“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human
possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think
it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy
results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have
changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even
for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion
of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is
his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a
caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of
its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves
the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far
from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a
seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
“..you wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent”
“Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms”
“Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.”
“It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.”
Jean-Claude Izzo's noir trilogy: Total Kheops, Chourma, and Solea.
What a clear and simple explanation you did about one of my favourite books and one of my favourite artists.
ReplyDeleteI am anxiously waiting for the next books.
With love
Dad
Thank you dad! I've learned from the best!
DeleteLove
Nene