Le Fantôme de Truman Capote de Leila Guerriero: the Catalan tracks

Since his death forty years ago, the image of Truman Capote seems frozen in an aura that has become over time the tail of a comet. Will have appeared in the mid-1960s with the publication ofIn Cold Blood (De sang-froid), fourth and final novel by a 42-year-old New York socialite writer, son of the rural South. Thomas de Quincey had written Assassination considered one of the fine arts. A century later, Truman Capote turned a quadruple murder into a long, torrential report, a genre that he elevated to the rank of a titanic work of fiction, a “document novel.” Many authors since have been inspired by it, from Norman Mailer to Argentine reporter Leila Guerriero.

In the spring of 2023, she is invited for six weeks to the fishing village of Sania, near Palamos, on the Costa Brava, in the same house where Truman Capote wrote a good part of The sang-froidhis cursed masterpiece. She will take advantage of this stay, in the…