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This Sweet Sickness (Paperback)

by P Highsmith (Author) "It was jealousy that kept David from sleeping, drove him from a tousled bed out of the dark and silent boardinghouse to walk the streets..." (more)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.; Reissue edition (15 Oct 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0393323676
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393323672
  • Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.9 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 812,226 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #58 in  Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Authors, A-Z > H > Highsmith, Patricia

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Product Description

Synopsis
Obsessed with his love for Annabelle Delaney, David Kelsey tries to break up her marriage and succeeds in accidentally killing her husband.
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It was jealousy that kept David from sleeping, drove him from a tousled bed out of the dark and silent boardinghouse to walk the streets. Read the first page
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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Highsmith, 12 Jul 2003
By R. P. Sedgwick "Grim Rob" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
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.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Good story but quite boring read., 7 Jul 2009
By Script Angel (Solihull, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: This Sweet Sickness (Paperback)
This story, on paper, has all the ingredients needed to make a powerful novel. There is an obsessive unrequited love, two murders and a suicide. However, because I found it difficult to engage with David Kelsey I found myself frustratingly unmoved by his story.

I'm afraid that my expectation of being swept along on a powerful emotional journey was somewhat disappointed. Like Highsmith's now more famous work The Talented Mr.Ripley however, this is a story about a character who appears casually unthreatening but who is in fact highly dangerous. Unlike The Talented Mr Ripley, our central character has little charm to recommend him. David Kelsey is a detached loner who rejects the friendship or affection of anyone who comes into his orbit, save the love of his life Annabelle. While Ripley may have been cruel in the extreme, he had a surface charm which mesmerised and intrigued. Kelsey on the other hand is cruel on the surface and downright treacherous underneath. Because one views Kelsey with the same detachment that he views the world I'm afraid that I found it very difficult to engage with him.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Bleaker than usual psychological thriller from the pre-eminent genius of the genre, 10 Mar 2009
By Jon E (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: This Sweet Sickness (Paperback)
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.
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