Customer Reviews

This Sweet Sickness

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

Earlier a reviewer wrote that Highsmith "hated men." This is entirely untrue: If you read her biography by Wilson, which includes excerpts and information from her diary, you will see that in fact she was a huge fan of the male sex and considered males superior in many respects to females. Many of the female characters in her books were problems for her to develop (one example from her diary is Heloise in the Ripley books) because she didn't feel she could identify with them. Very few of her protagonists, consequently, are female.

This Sweet Sickness exhibits first and foremost Highsmith's ability to deal with human emotion and the depth of the human psyche in her literature. The protagonist's desperation throughout the novel is obvious to the reader, although it does not actually fully surface until he starts to slip in the final chapter, and this exemplifies Highsmith's style. The police chase through Central Park is one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever read, and the climax that follows is successfully and powerfully tragic.

This Sweet Sickness is a terrific novel that follows the usual Highsmith "formula" but with a unique, and heartbreaking ending. A recommended read.

Patricia Highsmith's genius always seems to lie in her most pathetic and delusional characters. The amazing thing about this novel is the fact that it is so readable and suspenseful even though the protagonist is unsympathetic and a horrible snob.

Although I hated the character he was brilliantly realized and Highsmith evokes the upstate New York setting perfectly.

In some ways, the stalking victim, Anabelle is just as responsible for the tragic events of the novel as her stalker, the protagonist David Kelsey. Her infuriating passivity and wishy-washy personality influence the course of the story just as much if not more than David's obsessive pursuit of her.

This Sweet Sickness is up there with Deep Water and Cry of The Owl as not just the best of Highsmith's work but the most definitive of her views towards marriage and the domestic life which, even though they are misguided and abrasive, are entertaining.

If you are a Highsmith fan you will love this book. If you aren't familiar with her though I would say you should read Strangers On A Train or some of the Ripley novels to get a feel for her style or else you won't really be able to appreciate what she does in this work. It does stand alone as a novel but it is so intense that her other novels might dissapoint you if you read this one first.

If you like the Ripley series, this one is very similar, though the oddball chemical engineer obsessed in an unrequited affair is not nearly as sick as Ripley, and in fact may not really be a criminal at all, except for his posing under a fictitious name, another Ripley trait. Set in late 1950's Hudson Valley, NY, with short scenes in Hartford and LaJolla,Ca., one is still amazed at the incredible deviousness which this author specialized in. Also, the slow deterioration of a near genius, very successful young engineer absolutely obsessed by his ex girlfriend, who politely rejects him, but who won't give up his obsessive pursuit. Well worth reading, though maybe not Highsmith at her absolute pathological best.

Patricia Highsmith was a gifted novelist who could make the most unlikeable characters come to life and, moreover, make the reader root for her unsavory creations. Tom Ripley, her model of the amoral hero, is definitely the pinnacle of all of Highsmith's characters, but the flavor of what made the Ripley novels so ingenious is missing from "This Sweet Sickness". While David Kelsey, the main character in this novel, shares some characteristics with Highsmith's usual narrators, his focus is obsessively short-sighted and drawn out far too long.

David Kelsey, a gifted scientist stuck in a menial job, is obsessed by the girl who got away - Annabelle. When David took his out of state job to make money to marry the girl of his dreams, the girl of his dreams married another man. But this doesn't stop David from pursuing her. He buys a house in a nearby town, decorating it with items he knows Annabelle will like, and living a double life within his mind on these weekends he spends at his house. For while David is a model citizen to those who share the boarding house he lives in, few are aware of the lies David has told and his increasingly stalker-like behavior of the married Annabelle. When David's letters and phone calls only serve to outrage Annabelle's husband, David finds the idyllic false life he has built up for himself take a murderous turn. Yet he cannot give up the life he has created for the one that is real, no matter how much further into trouble he plunges.

"The Sweet Sickness" is an enjoyable read, but it can be a bit wearisome at times and is perhaps more dated than other Highsmith works. It also seems that the story is overly long, at least by one hundred pages, and maybe would've functioned better as a short story. As it is, events seem repetitive and the reader will find himself wishing that David would come back to reality already. A unique concept but not executed quite as well as other Highsmith novels which have stood the test of time.

The book "The Sweet Sickness" is written of Patricia Highsmith. It deals with a man (David) who is head over heels in love with Annabelle. They were a couple in the past, but now Annabelle is married. David can not forget her. He writes her a lot of letters and he also tries to meet her. But without any success she don't want him, he gets crazier and crazier and at least he kills two people but not on purpose. In the book David lives a double life.
I like the book because of the excitement, all the time something happens and it's not boring to read it. On account of the different interpersonal relations the book gets very interesting. I think you can put yourself in the place of David and for this reason you live with him and hope he gets Annabelle back. You have compassion of him. I also like the style which Highsmith chose for her book.

This is without question Patricia Highsmith's finest novel. A tale of difficult love (apparently a running theme in Highsmith's work, whether negative -- as here -- or positive -- as in SMALL G: A SUMMER IDYLL) and declining sanity, and overall, as Graham Greene put it, apprehension. We wait for things to happen and oh, how we are rewarded.

So, the setup is: David Kelsey, a young (late-twenties) chemist who lives in a boarding-house in Froudsburg, NY, is desperately in love with Annabelle, who loved him once but has now married Gerald, who David sees as a boor unworthy of her. He anticipates her leaving Gerald and living with him -- so much so he's bought a house in a neighboring town, fully furnished it, even including pictures of her; it waits while he continues to call her and send her letters -- which enrages Gerald, who finds out about the other house and goes to it while David's there in order to kill (or at least harm) him. David kills him, instead -- by accident, and kind of in self defence, though -- and informs the police in the other town under the name he bought the house by: William Neumeister. His friends -- and Annabelle -- don't know about Neumeister, the police don't know of David's life as himself in Froudsburg, and so he has to try to keep them both in the dark of either "person." And everything starts sliding downhill from there.

The tension is superbly built as the novel progresses, after the start creates a very palpable air of uneasiness in establishing The Situation (what David calls Annabelle's being married). And while, as others pointed out, the police are fairly incompetent here, it doesn't entirely detract from the novel -- although it may bother you with its lack of logic when you read it. But it's soon lost as the novel continues. What makes it so good is that rather than dealing with mere criminal tendencies, we find ourselves plunged with David headlong into the world of insanity -- which you don't usually in a Highsmith novel, at least not in the sense here; if the murdering is in Highsmith's other books is a form of insanity, it at least seems connected to reality. But here . . . The last 30 or so pages must be perhaps the most stunning portrayal of insanity ever written. (Of course, I may be wrong there, but it's still amazing as it stands.) It all leads to an incredible ending.

So the last quarter of the book or so is worth the price of the entire book alone.

Read it NOW.

The book is in fairly good condition considering its age. Upon reading it I find it's not as compelling as some of Highsmith's other books. Another reviewer had recommended it, and as personal opinions go, sometimes another's is not quite as expected. That is what happened with this purchase. Thanks.

Additionally, I would suggest "Those Who Walk Away," by Patricia Highsmith, just as suspenseful as the Ripliad. And on a farther note, "The Price of Salt," which came out about the same time as "Strangers on a Train." "Walk Away" has the extra fillip of being set in Venice, and since Highsmith spent considerable time in Europe, she knows Venice well: the action moves along clippety-clop among the Venetian quays, islands, and sections, not distracting, but illuminating events and even characters.