Beautiful Shadow
A Life of Patricia Highsmith
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- 16,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
WINNER OF THE EDGAR ALLAN POE AWARD
WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD BIOGRAPHY AWARD
'Bring[s] us as close to understanding Highsmith as we are ever likely to get' Sunday Telegraph
'An exemplary biography of a tortured, difficult and outstandingly gifted human being' Sunday Times
'Everything Wilson has unearthed is remarkable' Mail on Sunday
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Patricia Highsmith – author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley – had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents – diaries, notebooks and letters – which detail the links between her life and her work.
Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension'. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While British journalist Wilson's portrait of Highsmith (1921 1995) is neither graceful nor fluid, it is as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted over more than 50 productive years. The author of Strangers on a Train and five novels featuring the amoral and murderous Tom Ripley, Highsmith achieved considerable critical acclaim in her native United States, but never sold well here. She was better received in Europe and that was where she made her home. The biographer's exhaustive attention to detail coupled with his access to Highsmith's journals (or "cahiers," as she called them) and letters, and extensive interviews with her friends, lovers and associates, allow him to reveal in excruciating detail this very private person. Highsmith emerges as a woman of great intelligence, candor and curiosity, but also as a racially prejudiced, anti-Semitic and insensitive boor. She was an acute observer capable of seizing a single incident and transforming it into a complex story. But she was unable to transform her own unhappy life. Instead she transmuted her troubles, her experiences, her observations into her work. One of her lovers observed, "If she hadn't had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics' home.... She was her writing." Highsmith's work has had an important impact on both crime fiction and gay and lesbian fiction, and Wilson has impressively documented that as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
