Life’s all sparkles and martinis for teenage It-girl Holly Golightly. She’s slender, blonde, and gorgeous. She hosts private soirees and dazzles as queen among the drones, the barflies, the playboys. The downstairs neighbour loathes her, accusing her of whoring; the upstairs neighbour Fred - the narrator - is bewitched.

Fred befriends Holly. He can’t take his eyes of her. Even when she maddens him, he wants to touch her. To spank her. Holly becomes his muse, though he doesn’t know it at the time.

“Tell me, are you a real writer?”

“It depends on what you mean by real.”

“Well, darling, does anyone buy what you write?” (23)

Holly’s the butterfly who lives for a day. She flits from honeypot to moneypot, charming and disarming. Yet her empty apartment is set for flight and there is steel beneath all her lipstick and bon mots. She dispatches her rival in a single stroke. Holly’s a girl with nothing but today’s fine looks: she needs to survive.

Fred mocks Holly when she references the film of Wuthering Heights instead of the book. But I rather admired the girl who studies conversational baseball and politics in order to sail not sink.

There is much sadness beneath all the jazz and brandy. The marvel is that Holly spins so much gold, we almost miss that her story is a tragedy: rape-to-prostitution-to-oblivion.

I tried not to like this book, but Capote’s writing is beguiling indeed and he captures well the New York voice. That said, the presentation of the Japanese neighbour is derogatory, and there are several, caustic, anti-African slurs.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s puts me in mind of Jean Rhys. It would be interesting to compare Holly Golightly with the heroine of Good Morning, Midnight.

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published in 1958.

What to read next?

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato - it’s a short bitter chain from obsession to murder in this brilliant portray of logic unravelled

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - a haunting tale of a girl out of step with her country, sold into marriage