Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Random House Audio)
- Length:
- 14 hours, 26 minutes
- File Size:
- 397 MB (208 files)
- Published:
- January 2006
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Review by Scott Esposito, eMusic
Besides providing the movie-going public with an excellent flick, the release of the feature film Capote in 2005 did us the service of reintroducing Truman Capote's classic "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood, to a new generation of readers. Picking up in 1959 after an apparently motiveless quadruple murder in small-town middle America, Capote deftly narrates the assailants' flight and eventual capture while showing a quiet town coming to terms with the sense of terror and meaninglessness left behind by the unprecedented crime.
Though Capote's writing is superb throughout, what really sets this book apart is his ability to inhabit the character of Perry Smith, one of the two murderers. "Revealing the mind of a murderer" has become a horrible cliché, but Capote shows how this hackneyed concept can be brought to glorious heights, humanizing Perry and writing one of the most fully realized characters of 20th-century literature. When Smith's story meets its inevitable end, we feel it with the same weight that Capote must have after spending years getting to know and understand Smith in jail.
Scott Brick's smooth narration makes a fine complement to Capote's prose. The veteran of film, television and radio easily moves among the many characters in Capote's wide canvas. From the two murderers to trial witnesses to small-town residents, Brick manages to make each sound separate and convincing. Moreover, as Capote's story moves from tragic to poignant to comic, Brick's narration moves as well, changing key to remain in synch with what's happening on the page.
Quotes from the Critics
"[This] is the best documentary account of an American crime ever written, partly because the crime here in question is not yet a part of the heritage....But if 'In Cold Blood' deserves highest marks among American crime histories, it also raises certain questions. What, more or less, is the narrative intended to be: and in what spirit are we supposed to take it? While the book 'reads' like excellent fiction, it purports to be strictly factual and thoroughly documented, but the documentation is, for the most part, suppressed in the text....Whatever its 'genre,' 'In Cold Blood' is admirable: as harrowing as it is, ultimately, though implicitly, reflective in temper...." - New York Review of Books
"'In Cold Blood'...is a masterpiece--agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy. The tragedy was existential. The murder was seemingly without motive. The killers...almost parodied the literary anti-hero....There are two Truman Capotes. One is the artful charmer, prone to the gossamer and the exquisite....The other, darker and stronger, is the discoverer of death....He has traveled far from the misty, moss-hung Southern-Gothic landscapes of his youth." - New York Times Book Review
"[William Shawn, editor of 'The New Yorker'] would have been reluctant to say go ahead to Truman if he had known what, in point of fact, 'In Cold Blood' proved to be. I suspect both Shawn and Truman himself were surprised to find what the piece became." - New Yorker
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