Customer Reviews

The Tremor of Forgery

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title was the key for me in reading this novel. It's about "tremors"--the little twinges of doubt and guilt that affect everyone. The question that Highsmith poses is whether her protagonist is going to ignore those tremors, and thus lead something of an amoral (even evil) life. The answer to this is very ambiguous, but in a good way. In many ways this novel reminded me of The Stranger by Albert Camus--the same North African dolor, the same detached protagonist with few moral qualms.

The reading was s-l-o-w and a bit dry in places, but oddly alluring and page turning. It propelled me through, even when nothing was "happening". I don't understand why people said the writing was bad; it was clean and understated. All in all, it's worth picking up--if you're in the mood for some existentialist food for thought.

The two negative reviewers below demonstrate why a lot of Highsmith's admirers don't like her being described as a mystery/thriller writer, a description which often does her a disservice by pigeonholing her too narrowly and misdirecting reader's expectations. This book has few suspense mechanics in the usual manner, but I was gripped anyway; the queasy suspense is like an ominous murmur underneath an ordinary conversation, and you have to listen hard for it. The suspense is generated by the question "Will he do the right thing?", and also, as usual in Highsmith, by the reader's guilty identification with a morally compromised character. And I always find her spare, cool prose a pleasure to read (I like to compare it to the edge of a scalpel, even though those are not a pleasure). This may not be the best Highsmith book to start out with, since it's minimalist even by her standards (try "Cry of the Owl," maybe, since it has a tight thriller storyline). But I have to agree that out of the several of her works I've read so far, this is the best at conveying her theme of quiet evil existing within the mundane. (The five Mr. Ripley books come close.)

"The Tremor of Forgery" is a superb novel, but it may not be for everybody. If you are in the mood for suspense and clarity, then you probably won't enjoy this book. If you prefer something more subtle, psychological, and mood-oriented then I recommend it.

"The Tremor of Forgery" is sort of a mystery. It lacks the action and denouement of typical mysteries but definitely contains its share of questions and intrigue. In this case, though the mystery doesn't revolve around questions of guilt (who done it) but around character, environment, and identity.

Howard Ingram is an American writer who has been hired to go to Tunisia and write a screenplay. A number of mysterious events destroy his project but he decides to stay on and write a novel. His life in Tunisia essentially revolves around two people of opposite mindsets. Ingram's middle-aged neighbor, Adams is the quintessential naive, optimist and ideologue. He constantly speaks of "our way of life" (which earns him the nickname "OWL") and broadcasts pro-American propaganda to the Soviet Union. Despite living in Tunisia with apparent ease, Adams firmly retains his American identity. Jensen, on the other hand, is a Danish Artist and a homosexual who dislikes Tunisia, but in many ways appears to have gone native. He lives in an Arab section of town with simple clothes and few possessions. Jensen occasionally hires boys for sex, but his only real love appears to be his friendship with Ingram and his affection for his dog.

In the course of preventing a burglary in his bungalow, Ingram kills--or thinks he's killed--an Arab thief. The corpse (if in fact it is a corpse) disappears and Ingram is left to cope with the question of his crime. When Adams deduces what has occurred he pressures Ingram to come to terms with his conscience. Jensen, by contrasts, suggests that Ingram forget about the incident and points out that killing a thief is probably a common occurrence in Tunisia.

Soon Ingram must ask himself who he is and who he has become. Does Ingram retain an inherent set of Western values regardless of where he is, or does he adopt the morality of his environment? While questioning his identity, Ingram must also decide whether or not to marry his girl friend. And in an odd twist, Ingram's crisis parallels that of the hero in his novel.

For many readers the frustrating part of this novel is that nothing is ever resolved. At the end of the novel, Ingram does not comes to terms with his morality or identity, he never passes judgement on Jensen or Adams, and he enters into a relationship that promises trouble. We never learn the fate of the thief or whether Ingram even killed him. In today's shallow television culture, we often crave a definite ending in a story, but the beauty of this novel is that it provides the opposite. The people, places, and morality in this novel are defined to an extent but never completely. This creates a richer and more realistic story.

Highsmith also captures the flavor of third world travel perfectly. Anyone who has gone to a third world country and decided to stay on for awhile will feel at home in this book. The food, the people, the sickness, the ratty apartments, and then the odd and exhilarating feeling of departure all ring true. Like a great painter, Highsmith is more interested in the mood she evokes than in the technical components of her composition. And in this regard, she is one of the great masters of the last century.

Graham Greene once said that "The Tremor of Forgery" was his favorite book of Patricia Highsmith. After reading it I couldn't but agree with him. "Tremor" is a travel book, but also "character in crisis" book in the best Highsmith way. The depth of the situations, emotions and sutile mistery, make the reader plunge into despair when the last page folds and the story ends.

Sometime after Patricia Highsmith's death in 1995, my local bookstore moved her books from the "Mystery & Thriller" section to the more general "Fiction" section, a final irony for a writer who had been largely ignored in the U.S. (except perhaps by mystery readers). Why this was so is not clear at all. Did Hitchcock's filming of her 1950 "Strangers on a Train" fatally pigeonhole her as a mystery writer? Or did the expatriate nature of her life, living abroad in England, France and finally Switzerland for so many years, allow us to lose sight of her as a great American writer? For make no mistake about it, Highsmith was a great American writer, as evidenced by perhaps her most serious and ironic work, "The Tremor of Forgery" (1969).

"Tremor" begins with novelist Howard Ingham's arrival in Tunisia, where he expects to spend a few weeks writing a screenplay with the film's director, who will be joining him shortly. The director never does arrive, leaving Ingham to begin working on a new novel while immersing himself in Tunisia, where everything in his life gets turned upside down. His new novel is "about a man with a double life, a man unaware of the amorality of the way he lived." Is this a description that fits Ingham as well? "In his book, he had no intention of justifying his hero." Could this be true of Highsmith too?

Within a few pages, Highsmith introduces the kind of exotica found in the great expatriate novels: Cafe de Paris, Herald-Tribune, Pernod, jasmine. And by the end of the second chapter she has also introduced the novel's themes: identity, loneliness, male bonding, and cultural relativism. The latter figures prominently as Ingham begins to change, unable to make the decision to return home after realizing the film will never be made. Already in chapter 4 he is "irked" when he hears some "Germans" speaking "very American American." And soon the African sun makes difficult "the sheer effort of imagining New York's unwritten conventions."

The backdrop for this novel is the June 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. While not a factor in the plot, this war, which coincides with the first couple weeks of Ingham's stay in Tunisia, provides a historical context for the reader. This is definitely not the world of Lawrence of Arabia. Nor is it really the world of Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky" (1949). Rather, the world of "Tremor" is a precursor to our own troubled times. Which is not to say the novel could have been written yesterday. Some aspects of the novel make it almost a period piece. For even though the '60s can seem like only yesterday, those years were more like the previous century than like subsequent decades in many ways: international communication could be slow and unreliable, there were no cell phones, faxes, Internet, e-mail or credit cards. And in "Tremor" the characters still wear cufflinks.

Highsmith is not a humorous or witty writer, nor is she much of a stylist. However, there are many things to like about her writing. Two of the characters that Ingham meets in Tunisia are especially well drawn. Anders Jensen, a homosexual Danish artist, provides a European point of view on the "funny" Americans, with their annoying consciences. Francis Adams, a retired American, represents contradictory America during the Vietnam War (which is also raging, just out of sight) and stands for everything that Ingham's nickname for Adams conjures up: OWL (Our Way of Life).

The portrait of Ingham is also interesting. A successful young novelist who continues to write well even during periods of personal turmoil, Ingham wrestles with a number of demons. His meditations on identity, particularly cultural identity, have weight and significance for many of his decisions (or non-decisions). Is cultural identity tied specifically to place, so that Antaeus-like we lose our cultural moorings once lifted clear of our cultural origins? Or are there values and elements of character that are indelibly burned into us, unchanging regardless of setting? At one point, it appears that Ingham's "character or principles had collapsed." But this is followed almost immediately by an incident that contradicts this statement, where Ingham's character reasserts itself, one more bit of irony.

Highsmith, in her mid-forties, was probably at her peak when she wrote this novel. Nearly every sentence is taut and firm. Her writing is like that of a "thriller" the way M. Night Shyamalan's movies are like those of traditional "horror" films in that much of one's enjoyment and expectations are based on knowledge of the genre, the more so the better.

Would "Tremor" make a good movie? Highsmith has been filmed before, by international directors from Britain (Hitchcock, Minghella), France (Clement) and Germany (Wenders). Would the movie of this novel be too slow, too thoughtful, kind of an anti-thriller where what you expect to happen doesn't quite, ending with a mystery that almost isn't? Or could it be a nice quiet "psychological" movie, a period piece, in an exotic setting, containing foreshadowings of today's resurgent, militant Islam? It wouldn't have to be a Hollywood production. It might work as a PBS-type TV movie, assuming PBS one day expands its sense of "Masterpiece" to mean more than just "anglophile." Too obscure even for PBS? Well, PBS broadcast series made from Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and Olivia Manning's "Balkan Trilogy" and "Levant Trilogy" and none of these is exactly a trendy or action-packed work.

Highsmith might well have been thinking of her own novel when she describes Ingham's attitude toward his novel as "a difficult book for him to think of in film terms." But it's still fun to wonder about that possibility. And even more fun to read and re-read her novel whenever we need a bit of something exotic in our reading lives.

Tunisia, its blazing desert and ocean side hotels, is a land of many scents and sensations. The writer, Howard Ingraham, witnesses an incident from which he then is forced to confront himself stripped of all, albeit illusionary, protective devices. Within this jasmine scented, bloody and sordid terrain, Ingraham is exposed as a haunted and uncertain man, a man who is incomplete morally and whose attempts at intimacy and love have been, in retrospect, as deformed as the cat's broken tails, a fixation, it so happens, of the Tunisian populace.

Highsmith has written some of her finest ambiguous characters into this novel. The blaze of the desert sun and the atavistic Tunisian forces suspend that pretense of American self-assurance that so often drapes those travellers.
This is a gorgeous setting, a camel ride and an evening under the desert sky suggests there are some parts of Ingraham's sexuality that have not been fully realized. Highsmith portrays the tensions of life as they are- subtle, mysterious and always in a state of flux. The alienated Westerner in the midst of third world contempt and superficial graciousness. Israel has just won the Six Day's War, and there is news that an American's car was overturned in a neighboring city. Are they plotting, these Arabs who seem to talk loud all the time, and whose language is alien. Ingraham by turn, moves within the Arab neighborhood, below his artist friend, his confidant and his moral interpreter.

Looking for a clean tying up of the mysteries? As in life, that is far more an interpretation and an acknowledgement of the nature of the human heart- and its reluctance to show itself.

My favorite book a very long time. It 's chock-full of good ingredients. The descriptions of an exotic locale put the reader right there with the interesting main character who has parts of all of us in him. Not necessarily the good parts. The story is suspensful, and the writing is just the best. Ms. Highsmith has written the story as if she were placing stones carefully on top of the ones she's already set and at the end you see she's built a palace.

"The Sea of Doubt" is the title of this book in Italian, which, in my opinion, should've been its original title. Why? Howard is an interesting character in crisis to read about until he starts constantly changing his mind as to whether or not he loves Ina. Besides, after chapter 20, I started to feel a bit bored, like Jensen, everytime Abdullah's murder came up. I understand that Abdullah's murder is "the excuse" to address the moral issues in the book, but since such murder was more like an accident, I couldn't help thinking "let it go and move on!" whenever they went back to it. In the end, the only character I ended up liking was Jensen. OWL's preaching, along with Ina's hypocrisy, couldn't be more annoying and easy to dislike. However, the book atmosphere is hypnotizing and enthralling, and I loved reading it even though much wasn't happening in some chapters.

I can understand why Graham Greene and The New Yorker considered this to be Highsmith's finest novel, but she's written better books filled with aprehension, suspense and existentialism issues such as "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Strangers on a Train". The political, religious, moral and even sex issues addressed in this book make it worth reading, but I would've liked more depth about them. I'd define this book as an existentialist travelogue, because the descriptions of what it's like to be in Tunisia are very thorough. All in all, and despite the unexpected but disappointing ending, it's worth reading, specially if you're a Highsmith's fan. If you've never read Highsmith, don't start with this one, because it's certainly not a "mystery and suspense" book.

Separated from all that he is, a young writer is tempted to become much that he is not. He is tested, in several ways, with only his own antennae, sensitive to subtle and not-so-subtle moral and ethical malaise to protect him.

The state of mind of the main character has a disquieting, queasy-making effect on the reader. We dread his imminent personal disintegration, right up to the last few pages... when there is an unforced surprise which is a true and strong insight into - there is no other way to say it - how to live one's life.

An extraordinary book.

It's fairly short and is easy to read, but it's barely worth the time. The characters of Jensen and Adams are entertaining, and it is entirely believable that the protagonist, Ingham, would grow close to them in Tunisia yet likely not give them the time of day in the United States. But the plot is dull. Ingham finds himself on pairs of horns in two dilemmas, but in neither pair do the horns seem of equal size. He vacillates between wanting to marry Ina and letting her return to the U. S. alone, but she's attractive only to him and Adams and treats him badly. Ingham, after a previous robbery in the place where he is staying and other run-ins with shady characters, in the middle of the night throws a typewriter at a burglar, who then disappears, condition unknown, and then Ingham somehow feels torn between keeping quiet about it and telling the police about the terrible thing he supposedly did; how this is a real dilemma is beyond me. Neither of his quandaries is compelling, and they constitute the whole plot. And the end of the novel is wrapped up too neatly. Jensen's dog miraculously reappears, and Ingham receives a hopeful letter from his ex-wife, Lotte, of whom he is still fond, just after he sheds himself of Ina. The book was tied up so quickly and neatly that I half-expected a twist in the form of Adams as some kind of Magus, a la the John Fowles novel, a grand puppeteer who had stolen the dog and hid Lotte's letter, only to set them free once he had determined that Ingham had turned some sort of corner. This book was slightly better than Found in the Street, but that's not saying a lot. Hard to believe that Graham Greene thought it Highsmith's best novel. Maybe he intended his remark as a backhanded compliment.