This Sweet Sickness [Paperback]

Patricia Highsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks; UK open market ed edition (June 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747574995
• ISBN-13: 978-0747574996
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,319,672 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.