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The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar
Ebook The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar
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Review
“Schenkar has a wonderfully bold approach: not worrying about a linear chronology (although this is meticulously supplied in the appendices), but choosing instead to follow the emotional water course of Highsmith's life, allowing her subject to find her own level -- to be tidal, sullen, to flow without check, so that events in one decade naturally make an imaginative tributary into turbulence before and after. Schenkar's writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail of this biography. Highsmith was a detail junkie. Schenkar's nonlinear organizing method was a brilliant idea to save herself -- and the reader -- from data overload. This is a biography of clarity and style. A model of its kind. †―Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review; cover review“This is no ordinary biography...[Ms. Schenkar] writes with great authority and perverse affection...'The Talented Miss Highsmith' breaks much ground in connecting Highsmith's diabolical tales with the real women who prompted her strongest passions ....In addition to its impressive sweep, this biography also values minutiae. An exacting inventory of the contents of Highsmith's office captures every mundane object, right down to the goat's bell and the Wite-Out pencil. Highsmith loved details like that. And Ms. Schenkar shows an uncannily keen grasp of Highsmith's spirit. †―Janet Maslin, The New York Times“Throughout nearly 700 pages of lustrous text, Schenkar's prose is as supple and shapely as Highsmith's was flat and functional. "The Talented Miss Highsmith" is both dazzling and definitive ... Its scope and scholarship are unassailable, and its vigor indefatigable. t's a volume as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject.†―Daniel Mallory, Los Angeles Times“Ms. Schenkar provides a vivid, disturbing portrait of a writer whose work--thanks to some virtuosic movie-making--is known more as source material than as literary art in its own right... It is hard to imagine a more thoroughly fact-filled or energetic biography than "The Talented Miss Highsmith" or one more determined to examine the deepest recesses of its complicated subject.†―Alexander Theroux, The Wall Street Journal“[A] biography that captures the writer in all her sullen, sinister, ambivalent glory. Grade: A†―Entertainment Weekly“What most impresses me with Schenkar's approach is its boldness: she casts aside chronology to get at the themes of her heroine's character, and she conjures those themes by unabashedly connecting the events of Highsmith's life to her work. So we get marvellous formulations like this: 'Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act.' Much of Highsmith's work remains little known by the general reading public, and the details of her fascinating life obscure, Schenkar's book should serve as a corrective. We plan on delving into some Highsmith books we haven't read (I've just begun "The Price of Salt" and Jon is tackling Ripley), and we hope you'll approach this month's pick in a similar way--as an invitation to learning more about the work of, as Schenkar puts it, 'Her High Darkness, Patricia Highsmith: author of some of the twentieth century's most dangerous fictions.'†―Macy Halford, The New Yorker Online Book Club: Book of the Month“Schenkar's fascinating biography portrays Highsmith as driven by obsessions, especially her love-hate relationship with her mother, and a yin-yang ambivalence that became a central main theme in her writings ... The catalyst for Schenkar's exhaustive, compelling work, which boasts copious end notes, maps, charts, diagrams, bibliography, and chronology, was the recent unearthing of 8,000 pages of Highsmith's secret journals. The result is an essential, scholarly, lesbian, and literary biography.†―Booklist“A comprehensive, nuanced evaluation of Highsmith Country.†―Kirkus Reviews“VERDICT: An imaginative, definitive Highsmith biography, great for literature students, Highsmith fans, and mystery readers.†―Library Journal“Joan Schenkar is the first writer to grapple with Patricia Highsmith on every level of her being, from her bizarre personal life to her incredibly prolific writing life. It's hard to avoid superlatives when describing Schenkar's biography, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to go about it.†―Deirdre Bair, winner of the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: a Biography“This is an epic biography - vivid with Joan Schenkar's concern for her subject - the mercurial, gifted, fascinating mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith. Schenkar is an inexhaustible researcher and meticulous cultural historian, especially in the hidden pan-sexual world of literary New York of the 40s and 50s. She has a remarkable ability to evoke landscapes, relationships and, above all, a myriad of personal details from the fountain pen Highsmith used to the amount of alcohol she drank to the women she loved (and lost) all the while telling us how Highsmith concocted masterpieces like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. This is a big book, an awesome achievement. †―Patricia Bosworth, author of Diane Arbus: a Biography“Patricia Highsmith is a fascinating and bizarre figure, and a tremendous challenge for the biographer who has to account for her alcoholism, lesbianism, negativism, criminal tendencies, huge talent and much else. Joan Schenkar has accomplished this amazing feat with a really smart book. †―Diane Johnson, critic and novelist, author of Lulu in Marrakech“I was enthralled by The Talented Miss Highsmith. It's a brilliant biography, so finely judged in its critical appreciation of Pat's work, wonderfully informative about its sources and inspiration, and both enlightening and harrowing in its revelation of her tormented personality and darkly troubled yet (because of her exceptional talent) in some ways triumphant life. †―Francis Wyndham, critic, editor, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award forThe Other Garden
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About the Author
JOAN SCHENKAR is the author of Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde as well as a collection of plays, Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace. She lives in Paris and Greenwich Village.
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Product details
Paperback: 704 pages
Publisher: Picador; First edition (January 4, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312363818
ISBN-13: 978-0312363819
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.6 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.5 out of 5 stars
54 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#637,104 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
One of the most obnoxious books I've ever read. Why on God's earth would anyone write not *just* a biography of someone they revile, but a massive biography at that!? The book is filled with snide asides that inject the author and her biases at every turn (on French waiters mistaking Highsmith for a man and Highsmith thinking it was because of her big feet and hands, JS cruelly wrote, what else could she think). Schenkar also keeps the book unorganized, off a timeline and therefore very unnatural, if you will. The odd organization serves JS's ugly themes more than it does PH's life. By avoiding a linear timeline, I feel JS missed a most crucial fact of PH's life: that the woman at the end was vastly transformed by a life of unaddressed and rampant alcoholism. There's no surprise that PH was a different person near the end of her life. Instead of focusing on the beautiful, brilliant, funny, randy, likable and charming woman she was (or could be) when she created her best works (Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt [AKA Carol], The Talented Mr. Ripley), JS gets off on the ravaged PH: the anti-social, xenophobic, Semite-hating, snail-keeping woman, without giving due credit to classic alcohol damage (impulse control, sociability, etc). JS revels in the damage, wallows in her own hate and disgust. It's an appalling stance for a biographer. It would not be unlike assessing a former athlete after a devastating stroke -- sure, you can give horrifying descriptions of efforts to speak or tie shoes -- but would that be the essence of the athlete? While JS is an articulate woman and the book, such as it is, uses nice words and can at times be well-written, do NOT let this biased hate-fest be your only look at Highsmith or her life.
I love the cover photograph of Highsmith, and the title of this book is clever, but otherwise this is a terrible biography. The way the author jumps all over the place in time, sometimes going back and forth between a few decades within two paragraphs is very confusing and makes for an unpleasant reading experience.The reason I purchased this is because I am a huge fan of Highsmith's work and have read all of her novels at least twice. Some of her novels, like This Sweet Sickness, I have read over ten times. I have never done that with any other author.For some reason Joan Schenkar spends almost the entire length of this biography trashing Highsmith's work and writing style. From reading this you'd get the impression that only maybe one or two of her novels were worth reading.She also trashes Highsmith as a person by only focusing on the most negative traits of her personality. I'm sure we have all done bad things during our life or acted childish at some points, but I have a hard time imagining that Highsmith spent every moment of her life being drunken and miserable with a scowl on her face. That is just way too cartoonish for a real-life person.If she was really that unpleasant how could she have had so many friends and admirers over the years? It seems like half the information in here is based on the accounts of bitter ex-lovers, if you wanted that you may as well get it firsthand by reading Marijane Meaker's memoir about the time she spent with Highsmith.I am a fast reader, and not easily distracted, I am also an obsessive fan of Patricia Highsmith, it's normally a delight for me to read anything about her. This book has taken me about two years to finish reading. I've had to start it over twice, but I finally forced myself to get through it.I don't regret buying it, because there are some great photographs inside, and I love owning anything related to Patricia Highsmith, but this book works best as a decoration.Beautiful Shadow by Andrew Wilson is a much better biography of Highsmith that came out a few years before this one. He gives an unbiased and clear picture of her life. He is objective without feeling the need to trash her or her work. Ugh, seriously this book is terrible.If you bother to check my other reviews you can see that I am pretty easy to please when it comes to most things, I give all of Katy Perry's albums five stars. So for me to feel the need to give something one star is a big deal.
I thought the design of the book was interesting and detailed. Yes, some of the details were too lengthy and didn't add anything else to Pat's character or history. It seemed the author wanted to provide as much detail as possible for the reader. (Essentially, some readers may find no displeasure in it and others will skip ahead to another page.)The author did provide insight from the people who knew her through her life. It allowed the reader to see how she was on the inside and outside during various times in her life. It also allowed the reader to form their own opinion about her as well.The author tried very hard to present the facts of Patricia Highsmith and I don't feel it was the author contributing their own feelings into the subject. The author even provides multiple quotes from lovers, friends, family and acquaintances to reveal her true form and identity. Quite simply, she is a hard case to read upon and she is hard to understand and accept. She was not the easiest or friendliest person in life and for some this may be hard to accept by some readers who admired her work.A really good read!
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