Aw, I loved this book. Of course I've seen the movie and it's one of my favorites, but the book is so much more layered and darker. This is really Capote at his endearingly detailed and socially sardonic best. He excels at creating fully-fleshed and idiosynchratic characters-- he's a portrait artist, really. The narration of Holly Golightly's story through the lens Paul (or "Fred" as Holly calls him), a struggling writer perhaps less like a Capote than a John Cheever, sets Holly's character a bit faraway from the reader, giving a sense of mystery to her past and shadowy motivations. Considering this is supposed to take place during the '40s, the life she leads is very controversial: her lovers, her involvement with gangsters, her unwed pregnancy. We see her much more as a pained character, and here the "mean reds" are not PMS but an emotion scarier and deeper, with roots in her past as an abandoned child, but she's tougher and brassier than Audrey Hepburn's charming girlishness. So much of the story is about loss, but against the background of a very cool, cosmoplitan New York City, still full of swinging socialites, cool cats and Hollywood moguls even during war-time.