Creative Sensemaker: What to read, watch and listen to this weekend

Welcome to the latest Creative Sensemaker from Tortoise Media.

For an unfinished novel, Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers has accrued quite the mythology. Rather less enthralling than his true-crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, the three-part fiction was not published in book form until two years after his death.

Originally intended as America’s answer to Proust, all that survives of Answered Prayers is three vituperative, muddled and unstructured chapters that say more about Capote’s drug-fuelled decline than the state of the American Dream.

The story behind the book is far more interesting, which is why Ebs Burnough’s documentary, The Capote Tapes (VOD, 29 January), is such a gripping contribution, shedding light on the author’s fall from the toast of Manhattan to social exile.

The film is one of the great examples of what happens to an artist when he or she becomes the work. By the end, Capote’s literary magic was consumed by his bohemian, hedonistic persona, and it was this, rather than his sad, unfinished book, that fascinated and appalled people.

The novel’s epigraph, attributed to Saint Teresa – ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers’ – could scarcely be more apt. Capote got everything he had dreamt of, and it destroyed him.

Here are this week’s recommendations:

Watch

Read

Listen