Product Description

David Kelsey has an invincible conviction that life is going to work out just as he has planned it. Even though his one true love, the brilliant, beautiful Annabelle, has married another man, that can't possibly be the end of their relationship, can it? They can certainly still be friends. And even though she is pregnant with her husband Gerald's baby, that surely doesn't mean she won't one day get back together with David, does it? David is sure she'll take him back, and, under an alias, is setting up a wonderful home for the two of them in a town close by. And everything is just about going to plan until things take a murderous turn, leaving David a desperate man on the run.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52826 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
'A writer who has created a world of her own; a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger' Graham Greene 'Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality' Newsday 'To call Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability' Sunday Times 'The genius of Highsmith's writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing' Boston Phoenix

About the Author
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, who was to appear in many of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously just over a month later.

Customer Reviews

Classic Highsmith
This Sweet Sickness is a classic Highsmith book. I've read all of her novels, and this one has always held the place of my personal favourite, even though it is less well known than the Ripley novels, or Strangers on a Train.

David Kelsey is a typical Highsmith protagonist: self-obsessed, arrogant and opinionated, with a good income and a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. He has become infatuated with his former fiancee Annabelle to the extent where it dominates all his thoughts. He has become convinced that it is only a matter of time before he persuades her to come and live with him and resume the life they briefly had together - in fact the reverse is the case.

At weekends he has established an alter ago, William Neumeister, who is the perfect partner of his adoring wife - except it is all pretend! As the events in the book unfold (without spoiling it by going into the details) Kelsey is forced to retreat into his Neumeister persona more and more as life as his real self becomes increasingly unbearable.

A tense psychological thriller, This Sweet Sickness unveils an obsessive personality whose mad world becomes increasingly chaotic as it increasingly deviates from reality and ultimately impinges in a fatal way on the lives of others around it.

Bleaker than usual psychological thriller from the pre-eminent genius of the genre
Even by her own unparalleled standards, Patricia Highsmith's "This Sweet Sickness" ranks as an extraordinarily dark psychological fiction. It's the story of David Kelsey, a man obsessed by a former girlfriend, Annabelle, to the point where he has set up a home for them both even though she has long since moved on, having married another man and started a family with him. Though he holds down a good job in a fabrics manufacturing company and enjoys a reputation as a model citizen, David spends every free moment of each day fantasising about Annabelle, pondering his next move in trying to win her back, and imagining the time when she will 'come to her senses', leave her husband and come to live with him. He's even created an alter ego, William Neumeister, in whose name he bought the house in the country that he longs one day to share with Annabelle. Spending his working weeks in a guesthouse near his factory, and every weekend, under his assumed name, at his country home, David has to resort to ever more elaborate subterfuges to keep his double-life secret from his weekday colleagues and housemates. Things come to a disastrous head for 'William' one weekend with an accident - or is it a murder? - that threatens to expose David as the psychotic fantasist he really is.

Highsmith weaves her customary web - at once compelling and repellent - in this claustrophobic tale, immersing the reader in the disturbing and deteriorating psychology of her leading man. The narrative grips like a vice, and though David is arguably one of Highsmith's most unlikeable creations - completely lacking the amoral charm, for example, of Tom Ripley - once one has been lured into his world it's impossible not to want to follow his plight to its bitter end.

Though not recommended to the casual reader, Highsmith fans will no doubt appreciate "This Sweet Sickness" as one of her bleakest novels. Unlike most of her fiction, what it depicts seems rather more like an inexorable descent into mental illness and less an exploration of how the moral agent can, in the blink of an eye, slip effortlessly into the realm of amorality, sometimes momentarily, often irrevocably. As such it is a little less subtle and dangerously seductive than her very best work, but it remains as disquieting as anything she ever wrote. And for all its singular concentration on David, Highsmith populates his world with a rich supporting cast of characters, such as the old folk who live at his guesthouse, or Effie, the girl whose intense, unrequited love for David strangely mirrors his own situation. Demonstrating the writer's sublime control of her craft, these are memorably frail and sad creatures in their own right.

Compelling and disturbing
This is quite some novel. I admit I am already a huge fan of PH's work and this book did not let me down. It is not an easy read on an emotional level, as it basically deals with a descent into a painful mental turmoil for the lead character, David. PH's expert skill in gradually revealing the extent of this character's decline is astounding. The reader may initially have some sympathy for David, though he is never a likeable character, but this dissipates as the story progresses and his behaviour becomes relentless, frustrating and ultimately shocking. As always, the writing is tight and full of suspense and one cannot help but wish that Hitchcock had got his hands on a few more of PH's creations.