Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)

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Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel written in the Southern Gothic style by Truman Capote. The story focuses on 13-year-old Joel Knox following the loss of his mother. Joel is sent from New Orleans to live with his father who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion in rural Alabama, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, debauched cousin Randolph and defiant Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remain a mystery. The novel attracted much attention due to the provocative photograph of the then-23-year-old Capote on the dust jacket. This novel has often been considered autobiographical, and Truman Capote would admit that it was some years after it was first published.

Quotations

• At Jesus Fever's funeral;

"It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."

"A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."

• "The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries." (P 113)
• "Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure." (Miss Amy)
• "She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

"Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons, an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable."