Brave New Heart Of Darkness From Brazil

A while back I decided to get into reading some of the classics. Yesterday, I bought three books:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

Two are classics, the other one is apparently pretty interesting. I finished In Cold Blood. It was very well written. Capote had an economy of style that showed just how talented he was. No word was wasted, nothing was too elaborate. The sparse style meant the tension built up meticulously throughout the book, until the moment of the murders was recounted. When they were revealed, the full horror was clear for all to see. There was no getting around the plain truth of Capote's plain words.

It reminds me of the times I've had to cover stories in court. Often times people can rationalise events to themselves - "he deserved it", "she was asking for it", "it wasn't as bad as it seemed", "it just got out of hand too fast" - but then they have to hear them played out in court. And in the fluorescent light, in front of the imposing judge's bench, hearing the facts read out is sobering. What seemed like a plausible explanation for a terrible act quickly washes away as a ridiculous falsehood. I remember watching one man convicted of raping his friend at the Falls Festival, and he just looked bowed. His whole family was there to hear the facts of the case - how he raped her after she tried to overdose on drugs, how she was conscious but unable to move the whole time - and in the cold light of the courtroom his actions were completely indefensible. At the time? I've no doubt his thought processes were giving him some rational reasons for what he did. But months later, in the courtroom, with his family and the media there, there was absolutely nowhere to hide.

If you get a chance to read In Cold Blood, I say go for it. It starts slowly, but Capote is building a picture. You really get to know the family who dies, and the killers who kill them. By the end of the book, I was convinced they deserved their fate.