This Sweet Sickness [Paperback]

Patricia Highsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2002

Following the national bestseller Selected Stories, this fall brings the republication of a gripping Highsmith classic.

In This Sweet Sickness, David Kelsey has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix The Situation: he is in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them, David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Highsmith] is no more a practitioner of the murder mystery genre than are Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Camus. -- Joan Smith, Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323676
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323672
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #464,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strange story of sexual obsession and deteriorating sanity, August 2, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: This Sweet Sickness (Mass Market Paperback)

David Kelsey is a scientist whose unrequited love for a woman named Annabelle has not diminished over time, even though she has gone on to marry another man and give birth to a baby. Highsmith's protagonist--like most Highsmith protagonists--has a sense of perverse righteousness and a profound freight of guilt that he carries everywhere. The dreariness of the setting--largely a rooming house in a sad little upstate New York town--creates a nice counterpoint for this tale of consuming love and delusion. The final pages of the book, which take David into full-scale psychosis, are truly stark and believable. This, we feel, must be what it's like to be insane. And the last line of the book is, well, a killer

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars when too much love is BAD thing..., December 12, 2000

By 

lazza (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Sweet Sickness (Mass Market Paperback)

This Sweet Sickness is a short yet accomplished work by Patricia Highsmith which chronicles the life of a young man obsessed with a former (and now married) girlfriend. He is completely delusional in thinking their relationship lives on, and his mental state degrades rapidly with rather disturbing (and violent) consequences. As usual, Patricia Highsmith unveils the 'sickness' of her main character very slowly. This allows the reader to really judge matters from the main character's perspective, regardless of his/her mental state.

The only negative aspect with This Sweet Sickness is how the police force are viewed, in general, as incompetent in solving a murder (..I won't say who is killed, nor divulge whom the killer is). Other Highsmith novels portray the police as cold yet extremely capable. This mistreatment of the police force almost turned me off from This Sweet Sickness completely. However all is forgiven with the novel's ending, which is truly beyond belief (let's just say the main character's mental state is completely shattered). It is perhaps one of the most memorable endings to any novel I have read.

So This Sweet Sickness is a worthy read overall.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading, June 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: This Sweet Sickness (Mass Market Paperback)

This is an quite interesting story about a man's desperate love for a girl that is out of his reach. It also contains some psychological aspects which give an even more thrilling touch to the novel. Patricia Highsmith perfects the art of transporting the reader into a dangerous, double-edged world of crime and lies. It's absolutely worth reading.