Longo e formidável artigo com 10 páginas retirado da conceituada revista NEW YORKER, edição de 13 de Outubro de 1997.
CAPOTE'S LONG RIDE
Thirty-two years after the publication of "In Cold Blood", the rest of the story comes out.
BY GEORGE PLIMPTON
Na introdução pode ler-se:
On November 15, 1959, intruders entered a lonely farmhouse in the wheat fields of a small rural community, Holcomb, Kansas, and murdered the owner, Herbert Clutter, bis wife, Bonnie, and their two children Kenyon and Nancy. In mid-December, Truman Capote went to Kansas to write about the case for this magazine, initially to explore the effect on a small town of multiple murders thought to have been committed by locals. In fact, the killers were two ex-convicts, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who had been misinformed by a prison inmate that Herbert Clutter kept a large amount of money in a safe. In his classic "In Cold Blood," Capote writes of the "long ride" the two men take after leaving Holcomb, their capture by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, their trial, and their subsequent execution. Capote liked to say, and often did, that with "In Cold Blood" he had invented a new literary form, the nonfction novel"-- that is to say, a work of reportage to which fiction techniques are applied. Some of his peers were wary of the apparent contradiction in the term, among them Norman Mailer, who said that a nonfiction novel sounded like a "prescription for some non-specific disease.
What follows is yet another literary form, often referred to as "oral biography (which also sounds like a prescription for a non-specific disease), in which various voices are knitted together to form a whole. A more accurate term might be "oral narrative". It reveals new details about Capote's unusual style of reporting, his extraordinary impact on a small Kansas community, and his conduct on the day the killers went to the gallows.
A SANGUE FRIO