A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor (Modern Library)

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book!
Review: Three very touching short stories by Capote that are sure to bring back memories of your own childhood in some way or another. Capote has the power to somehow make everyone relate to his experiences in a way some authors can't. So good that I own the book and "A Christmas Memory" makes me cry every time I read it...every single time. Touching stories about how little his family had but how much he was loved by Sook and how happy that love made him. Great book!

Rating:
Summary: Touching, indeed, but so much more as well.
Review: While as other reviewers have stated, these three stories unfailingly and unflinchingly touch the heart and celebrate the spirit in ways far too many holiday tales only aspire to, Capote's stories, like his longer finished works like IN COLD BLOOD, are also pure literary delights. The characters of Buddy, Miss Sook, Odd Henderson, and Buddy's New Orleans father are richly individual and fully realized, yet resonant of some of the most colorful characters in the vast and lovely muddy swamp of Southern literature. Capote has often been reviled as a dissipate, degenerate, and decadent social butterfly, but these tales show him to hold the highest moral standards, of such degree that his defamers could never mete. The appeal of his work is wide and varied. There is a bit of the Dickensian in his characters as well as echoes of Faulkner, Tenessee Williams, Flannery O'Connoer and his chum, Carson McCullers. Stylistically, if one listens carefully, Poe and Melville, even Hawthorne and Cooper, and especially Capote's beloved Proust ring through and true. Truly, a holiday treat. Read it annually.