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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780679745648
ISBN number: 0679745645
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: February 01, 1994
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: February 01, 1994
Sale Popularity Level: 64483
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
Published when Truman Capote was only twenty-three years old, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a literary touchstone of the mid-twentieth century. In this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval he seeks.
Fueled by a world-weariness that belied Capote’s tender age, this novel tempers its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence with an appreciation for small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.
This new edition, featuring an enlightening Introduction by John Berendt, offers readers a fresh look at Capote’s emerging brilliance as a writer of protean power and effortless grace.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Rated by buyers -
Other Voices Other Rooms is at times massively confusing, intensely beautiful, and mystical. Often, all at the same time. Capote's command and use of language and style is unquestionably brilliant, and many times the text reads like poetry. Capote is simply a masterful composer of language. Every word in its rightful place.
Capote also has the gift that many writers lack and that is a descriptive prowess that completely surrounds the reader and engulfs them in the world of the text. The very first time that Idabel describes the history of the Cloud Hotel to Joel the reader finds themselves seeing this world materialize in front of their eyes. To be so completely lost in a work speaks highly of the writer's abilities!
Another great strength of this text is how accurately it displays how a child left to his own devices has to create and interpret the world around him. Joel is left to figure out the world for himself, and considering his age and limited experience he does a decent job of it. Joel's interpretations of the world are oftentimes not concrete, or even accurate, and this is where the adult reader will find themselves at moments confused. Reread, it will be worth it.
The main theme of this novel is love and acceptance, and how we all pine for it from our earliest memories. Every character longs for it in some form. The successful ones find it very first in themselves. The recognition of that is the greatest achievement in this text, and the scariest.
Rated by buyers -
If Truman Capote were alive today, he'd be thrilled about the latest (July 2008) issue of Italian Vogue. All the fashion pictures use grey women models. It's Vogue's way of saying: Hey don't forget about this particular minority. They're still available to wear your dresses and bikinis; they're just as interesting as ever, just as beautiful as white models. Come rediscover them.
In Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote makes a similar, albeit more subtle---call it abstract---but no less compelling pitch for his minority. His vaguely autobiographical coming of age novel, written in 1948, features an effeminate boy of twelve. Like most boys his age, Joel is searching for an identity. He is not becoming what he thinks he should be. His attempts at following the rules of the straight life are not going as planned. His tomboy friend, Idabel, rejects his advances; conversely, he runs from an opportunity to bed Wisteria, a cutie pie midget circus performer attracted to him because he is nearly as small and cute as she. His straight world desires not withstanding, Joel happily shares hugs and kisses with the cross-dressing, book quoting, martinet who also once put a bullet into Joel's father. While the gay Randolph may not be the love Joel was looking for, from all appearances, he is the sort of lover Joel is destined to have.
Through his wondrous words---Capote writes like Piccaso---- he paints an abstract picture of those we find hard to accept for what they are or what we think they are. Held up to himself, Capote's fun house mirror reflects every pain in the heart and soul of all minorities anywhere. Unlike the July issue of Italian Vogue, his is not a pretty picture but it is no less riveting.
Rated by buyers -
I found the book difficult to read and to understand, and I have read a wide variety of Capote's other writings and admired most; but, I ended up reading this book twice, cover to cover, before I could understand clearly what it was all about. There are two themes and there is a story within a story. Plus there is time shifting and the two stories blur together. The novel is about the visit of a young man to the home of his estranged father - who had re-married. The death of the boy's mother triggers the visit. The younger teen, left alone in the world, goes to his father's home and expects to find something which he cannot quite define. He does not find it, and instead discovers other stories, other situations, and other unexpected feelings.
The opening pages describe the ride to the home in an old Ford truck, and that part is very creative and descriptive. It sets the mood for the return of the young Joel Knox to his father's house in the rural south - to Skully's Landing near Noon City. The story is set among the humid fields and swamps near New Orleans, the original home of the boy. Having grown up in a rural area where there was little electricity in the 1950s, I was not surprised by his characterization of the area. And, in fact, I thought that the setting was interesting but secondary to the thrust of the story.
The story is about the clash of generations or expectations between the young healthy and inquisitive man and his declining father who is indifferent to the young man - for reasons that are part of the plot. And, it is about the life of the father. In addition, there are many interesting local characters and an underlying sexual tension in the young man.
The book becomes complicated and a difficult read as the story progresses, but overall still worthwhile - especially after two reads.
Critics call the book brilliant and intense. I did not find it intense, just complicated and sometimes difficult to follow, especially the center sections. The prose is excellent and the novel signals that Capote has talent and imagination: he is a serious writer worth following. On its own, it is short of being a masterpiece.
Rated by buyers 
-
Sometimes I think books that are considered "classics" are given good reviews because people, who are told the book is a good read, start to believe it actually is. I thought the book was decent but definitively not worth all the praise it gets. I found the writing choppy and unclear is several places. This was most apparent towards the end when Joel became ill. Maybe I fell asleep but I didn't see any clear indication on what his illness was. This lack of explanation made the story a very tedious read. I'm currently reading a later work by Truman Capote and his writing had vastly improved with age.
Rated by buyers -
Eight years after William Faulkner published THE HAMLET, the very first portion of his acclaimed Snopes family chronicle, and roughly ten years before the other two novels of the trilogy, THE TOWN (1957) and THE MANSION (1959) appeared, a remarkable very first novel by Truman Capote arrived on the Southern literary scene. Just as Faulkner's full trilogy would come to symbolize the seemingly irresistible and inevitable decay of the post-Civil War South, so too did the young Capote's OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS depict the Deep South as a frayed and unhealthy vestige of its former self. Here we have it all - a desolate ruin of a formerly noble estate now quite literally sinking four inches a year into its own grave, a brother and sister who at least implicitly evidence the despoilage and grinding lassisitude of inbreeding, bizarre marital arrangements straight out of Baby Jane, slavery in spirit if not in fact, and a half-hearted homosexuality devolved into a despoiled and dissolute ennui. If anything, it's almost too much, a hand overplayed to the point of caricature
The basic story line is simple. Twelve-year-old Joel Sansom is shipped out of New Orleans by his caretaking Aunt Ellen to finally meet his absent-since-birth father Edward Sansom at a manor called Skully's Landing. Joel quickly discovers that he has left the big city world of the Big Easy for the small town South, with Skully's Landing existing in an isolated netherworld well beyond the edge of the closest small town of Noon City. The manor is now home to Joel's father, a nearly Siamese-attached brother and sister Randolph and Amy (the former a pompous and lazy effete, the latter a spineless neurotic), and a grey maid named Missouri who goes by the name Zoo and whose father is named Jesus Fever. Young Joel is utterly confounded by this crew and mystified by his inability to meet the father whom he has been told lives there. His only consolation is two neighboring sisters, Florabel and Idabel Thompkins. Idabel in particular catches Joel's fancy by her combination of tomboyish behavior and naïve but not altogether innocent sensuality. In the end, young Joel learns the peculiar truth about Randolph and his father, one that intertwines with the fate of a prizefighter named Pepe Alvarez and a sensual, dream-recording woman named Dolores (dolorous?).
Capote's very first novel to enter onto the literary stage is at once Southern Gothic in setting yet contemporary in its content. Right from his opening pages, Capote brings the slashing insights and brilliant command of phrase and language to OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS that he continued to display in his later works. In his very first paragraph, before we have met a single character, Capote issues a foreshadowed warning about "luminous purple logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses." Skully's Landing is a place where "the sun was locked in a tomb of clouds," where "folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead," where "copper waterbugs swung on intricate trapezes of insects' thread, and fungus-flowered fist-size on the wet decrepit wood."
While Truman Capote properly remains best known for IN COLD BLOOD and BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, his earliest novel deserves equally to be read and savored. It is a literary oddity, a coming of age story set amid the decaying ruins of a family and a society. One could readily imagine Capote seeing the Randolph in himself while identifying with young Joel's search for his place in the world. And when all is said and done, OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS feels remarkably life-affirming. How better to sum up Capote's own life and work?
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