Breakfast At Tiffany's

I must say that out of all the required reading I've ever had to do for
a course or class, Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's has to be my favorite
book of them all so far. It is so wonderfully written, with witty
exchanges of dialogue and some of the best descriptive paragraphs I have
ever read before. Holly Golightly, the character whom the story focuses
on, is a very lively and colorful character who is so flesh-and-blood
and lifelike that she almost jumps off the page and into the room.
Also, in yesterday's class, I was very excited to see some excerpts from
the film version as well, which is, as any film buff will say, a
classic. However, I must say that the book is much better.
The film, starring the elegant and chic Audrey Hepburn, takes a
departure from the book in many ways. For instance, the content of the
book is much more racy and crude, which the Hollywood sensors of the
time would see to it to remove from the script. Also, the character of
Mr. Yunioshi, a Japanese photographer who lives in the same building as
Holly, is portrayed as a buck-toothed, slanty-eyed, rodent-looking
creature played by (in other films,) the quite talented Mickey Rooney.
Even as we watched these scenes with Yunioshi in class, I could hear the
sporadic "racist" exclamations. It just goes to show how much time has
changed since then.
Also, what I happened to notice in both the film and the novella,
is that the character of Holly Golightly is a very independent woman.
For her time, she is quite the antithesis of the "average woman" of her
day. She seems to almost assume the role of a man in various
situations. For instance, in the film, Holly is seen flouncing about
"Fred's" apartment in a man's shirt, mixing drinks and holding most of
the conversation while he lays in bed after an affair with another
woman. In a "typical" drama of the day, the woman would be the one
lying around in the bed with the man mixing drinks and holding light
conversation. The "reversal" here I found to be completely interesting