SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 22, 2021] “Truman Capote”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
I read this whole story believing it was written by Truman Capote and believing that perhaps (as with many of the other authors in this collection) he originated from a place I didn’t realize. And that Hassouna Mosbahi was a person or perhaps a place that I’d never heard of.
And I thought it was really weird and meta that Truman Capote was writing about himself and that he was writing about himself as if he were dead. It seemed like a pretty crazy conceit.
Whoops.
This story is introduced by a narrator who relates his forgetfulness. He has arrived home in Tunisia, but he’s not sure why. Eventually he discovers a telegram that informs him his grandmother has died. While he is in the center city he sees Truman Capote in his white suit and hat.
It was certainly Capote, so he followed him. Capote went into a house of ill repute. But when the narrator tried to follow Capote in, the guard said it wasn’t a whorehouse it was the headquarters of the New Party. After a time Capote walked out with a woman on his arm and the narrator marveled that all of this was going on in “the fourth most sacred city in Islam.”
The guards chased him again and he found himself back in his adopted town of Hamburg, with his lady, Doris who requested that they go see Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So yeah, this is a pretty weird story, and I don’t really see what Capote has to do with anything.
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