Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley. Comment.

 

It has been quite a few years since cracking this novel's cover once again. After seeing the excellent film adaptation with Matt Damon as the infamous Mr. Ripley, returning to the novel had been at the top of the list. As my "must read" pile slowly diminished, Highsmith's novel appeared, and I have read it with the same pleasure and suspense as the first encounter. This is a great `classic' in the truest sense of the word. 

 
Having read all five novels in the series, the first instalment is without question the best of the lot...a close second would have to be Ripley Underground and interestingly, the last novel of the series, The Boy Who followed Ripley. Let us face the fact that all the novels are exceptional pieces of crime fiction, introducing the first schizophrenic murderer, a serial killer with a likable and charming personality. In the crime genre, at least, Tom Ripley is the anti-hero that everybody loves and wants to succeed despite his ruthless machinations to achieve his goals. In crime fiction, this was original, and never really has been duplicated since. 
 
At the start of this novel, the reader recognizes that Ripley is a tad on the criminal side, engaging in tax fraud, realizing he would never cash the embezzled checks; he merely does it for the challenge and thrill. He's asked to go overseas to persuade a certain Dicky Greenleaf to come back to the States and join his family. Father Greenleaf pays all of Ripley's expenses and he travels abroad to the beautiful town of Mongibello, Italy. One incident led to another; Dicky rejects Ripley's friendship over a frumpy girl, Marge, and, unexpectedly, Tom murders him on a small motorboat with the end of a wooden oar. This murder is savage and brutal but effective, though Ripley's conscience is clear as he becomes Dicky Greenleaf, assuming Dickies identity with frightening skill. 
 
What makes this story unique and compelling is Highsmith's writing, narrating the tale in the third person but from Ripley's perspective only, and giving us a glimpse into the mind of a sociopath and ruthless killer. 
 
To be fair, Tom Ripley is indeed a likable character, an individual with good taste in art, food and anything of beauty. He teaches himself Italian, French, and later German to ensure his schemes come off without a hitch. In the later novels, he has acquired a magnificent French mansion, filled with original art and co-habituating with a beautiful and rich young woman. He also, in the later novels, becomes an expert gardener, spending hours on his lavish property. We really like this man but, be aware, because he turns and kills, without a second thought, when it suits his plans or thwarts his carefully laid out schemes. Never get in this man's way. 
 
Ripley is a dangerous individual, a man who views the world in a much different way than the rest of us. Although a true psychopath, Highsmith has made the reader like the guy, hoping, for some reason, that he gets away with whatever crime he's committing... very strange, original and terribly seductive. 
 
If you have not read Highsmith before, read the Ripley series, particularly The Talented Mr. Ripley, and if you are hooked, the novels can be read over again through the years because, like all true art, these novels are timeless. 

 

Richard Matheson – Somewhere in Time – Comment

 

The novel has become a classic tale of romantic and obsessive love, notions of fate in our lives and the possibility of time travel. 

 More known for the 1980 film adaptation starring Christopher Reeve as the protagonist, Richard Collier, Jane Seymour as Elise McKenna and an excellent performance by Christopher Plummer as her aggressive manager, author Richard Matheson penned the screenplay, turning the film into a cult-like classic with continued popularity over a generation. 
 
Considered by Matheson to be his best-written novel, the book begins with a Note by Collier's brother, Robert, who has doubts whether he is doing the right thing in publishing his brother's manuscript. This clever literary device, to my mind, gives the novel credibility, presenting the work as not a work of fiction but a real event. 
 
Richard Collier is a writer for television diagnosed to have a brain tumor, (a death sentence) and sets out to travel in his car, flipping a coin, leaving his destinations to chance, he arrives at the Coronado Hotel, a 19th century establishment where Collier comments, "The Past Haunts this hotel". In the hotel's quaint museum, he discovers a photograph of a well-known stage actress of the period, Elise McKenna. Richard's obsession begins; he falls in love with the long dead woman, and wonders how he can get back to her, in the year 1896. 
 
What is so good about this novel is Matheson's descriptions and feelings about the past once he travels back in time. The reader can see and feel what Richard sees and feels, in some cases, quite acutely. Richard Collier's method, too, of travelling back to the 19th century, for me, seemed quite feasible. There are no machines or technological transporters, merely his Will to reach his one true love. 
 
As has been mentioned many times, Richard Matheson is an original writer, his work mixing categories or genres: science fiction, horror, romance and the supernatural. He is a prolific writer of over 16 novels, film scripts, and television movies and was one of the main writers for the legendary show, The Twilight Zone. Matheson's other famous text, What Dreams May Come: A Novel , adapted for the big screen as well, starring Robin Williams, is also considered by the author to be one of his best novels. 
 
I found this novel to be very moving, realistic and original.  

Well worth owning and reading again. 

Donna Tartt – The Secret History – Comment.

 

Donna Tartt's, The Secret History, her first novel, was first published in1992. Since that time, it has been translated into several languages, and has sold millions of copies. The literary world, at that time, had never seen anything quite like it. The novel is not so much a crime novel, a thriller, but more so a character study about a group of students who, by their own devices, create a bizarre set of circumstances, set at Hampton College, where one mysterious murder follows another. These characters are special students all studying classical Greek under the tutelage of an erudite professor, a teacher of profound knowledge of the ancient world. The first murder is inadvertent, though the second one is the effort to cover the first one.  

At The Secret History’s appearance in bookstores across the city, I was working at a newspaper in the city, and my co-workers could not stop talking about it. I bought the hard copy and began reading it on the train going home. Living in a small flat next to a university, this seemed to add to the atmosphere of the story. Once opening its first pages, putting the text down was impossible. I tuned in to the last page after dawn the next day, without a wink of sleep, jumped in the shower and returned to work by train late that morning. I mention this because a book had never done this to me before, that is capturing my attention and concentration to such a deep extent.  

We are now living in 2024, and reading The Secret History again after 32 years, was no less the incredible experience I had in 1992. In a few instances, a better experience for a variety of reasons. 

What are the features of this superb novel that continues to excite and disturb this reader after 32 years?  

The main character, Richard Papen, is authoring this story six years after the events. In many ways I can relate to Richard as an outsider, a young man from a lower middle-class family from California. Attending a private ivy school with a group of wealthy friends with that eastern pedigree can be daunting, and his efforts to fit-in though subtle, were painful. Added to my interest in literature and philosophy, and the many references to the classics scattered throughout the tale, made the reading a personal event.  

All the characters have that pedigree, and the intelligence and reading resume, that could cause a post graduate student to wince.  

Henry really is the focus more than any of the other actors. He is erudite, speaks a variety of languages, including classic Greek, wealthy and the demeanor of a 19th century scholar. Henry is the leader of this group, and as we discover, many of this close group of friends are afraid of him.  

What also brought me back to this novel is Tartt's ability as a storyteller. I have read all her novels, all unique, and display this same ability. The writer’s prose style is detailed and pulls the reader along without effort.  

In way of the plot, the first murder is committed in a Bacchanal frenzy. Taken from the ancient Greeks, Baccha is the god of wine and abandon. It is known that those celebrating the god by way of wine, dance, and other unsavory means, can reach a certain purity of mind, that of pure animal, reaching a type of ecstasy, unveiling the illusions of this reality into the actual ‘reality’ of our existence. It is in these circumstances that the first murder occurs.  

As the novel progresses, the characters personalities become much more complicated. Their various responses to the ‘inadvertent’ murder evolve or devolve as time progresses. This devolution of the event creates a scenario where, in the group's view, another murder must occur for the safety of the rest.  

Donna Tartt has only written three novels in the last three decades. The writer has stated in interviews that a new novel will appear every ten years. Her last novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2014.  

For her many readers across the planet, and all agree, we are due for a fourth novel.  

Let us hope this fourth novel arrives sooner than later.  

 

Oliver Sacks – Seeing Voices – Comment.

 

In this extraordinary study, Dr. Sacks gives the general reader a penetrating insight into the world of the deaf. In his acclaimed The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, as a practicing neurologist, he brought his readers into the bizarre world of terrible brain related illnesses, presenting twenty-four cases of individuals afflicted with such diseases as agnosia or prosopagnosia, where "normal" reality is turned inside out, and how some of these diseases are treated and how the patients cope with their condition. In Seeing Voices, he permits us entry into the silent, at times strange, though culturally rich world of the congenitally and pre-lingually deaf. 

 As someone who has had no previous experience or knowledge in this area, for me this text opened a whole new area of culture and history that is continually growing and developing. 
 
Sacks explores the nature of language, touching upon Noam Chomsky's paradigm-shifting studies, "Syntactic Structures", "Cartesian Linguistics" and Language of Mind", where he proposes his theory that language is innate, lying dormant until it is made active through human interaction and culture. Sacks connects these theories to the pre-lingual deaf and its implications and manifestations. 
 
We are also given a history lesson on the language of SIGN, how it developed, why it was jettisoned, out of ignorant prejudice, in the late nineteenth century, and its miraculous comeback in the twentieth century. Through Sacks' concise and straightforward prose, he connects us to the foreign world of another language not dependent on speech, its intricacies, and its wonder, and how those of us who can hear and to verbalize, all too often take language for granted. He also makes clear the sophistication of Sign as a form of legitimate communication, its grammatical foundations, and its many nuances, and how, in some ways, it is a superior form of active exchange between people. 
 
In chapter three, Sacks tells us about the cultural breakthrough at Gallaudet University in March 1988, where after massive student protest, the school literally closed down, the first ever deaf president of the university was appointed. Sacks witnessed this social changing event firsthand, which in the end affected him more than he realized, 
 
"I had to see this all for myself before I could be moved from my previous "medical" view of deafness (as a condition, a deficit, that had to be "treated") to a "cultural" view of the deaf as forming a community with a complete language and culture of its own." (P.129-30) 
 
Indeed, this entire text has changed my view that deafness is not simply a condition or human deficit, but another way of being in the world. In fact, the deaf, with their shared language are forming a world community and culture crossing all barriers. And as Dr. Sacks points out, in this way, "...the deaf have something to teach us." (P. 167)