What I like about Oscar season (now many months removed from us) is that I get to know books that I had never known existed until I see them made into movies. And then I introduce myself to authors and ideas that I enjoy. Patricia Highsmith’s elegant novel The Price of Salt, adapted to the film Carol was one such example. I still haven’t see the movie yet, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it turned out. Find out why I give […]
they discern/what equilibrium they can recover
Well, it’s not like Cate Blanchett would choose to star in the adaptation of a bad Patricia Highsmith novel. I haven’t actually seen the film, but the trailers and still photographs project a certain sort of aesthetic that I found intriguing–rich colours, gleaming cocktails, and soft lights; crisp coral lipstick on a smile that says come hither and f**k off. This is the first novel of Highsmith’s that I’ve read; as Val McDermid points out on the cover of my edition, it has “the drive […]
You could never get away with this in 2016, that’s for sure
I saw the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley in theaters in 1999. I remember very little, other than one of the gorgeous leads (Jude Law or Matt Damon) spends some time in a bathtub and you can kind of see his junk for a second. I had no idea that it was based on the first of a series of books written in the 1950s. A pretty good book, too, although it features neither Jude Law or Matt Damon. The book starts when our protagonist, Tom Ripley, […]
Being of Two Minds
Patricia Highsmith might be best known for her Ripley novels and their film adaptations, but Strangers on a Train, her first novel, set the path for her career and has likewise been adapted several times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It is an unsettling, suspenseful psychological thriller that features brutal crime and some deep philosophical pondering. Guy Haines, an up and coming architect, is on his way home to Metcalf, TX, with the expectation that his philandering wife Miriam is going to finally […]