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Indlæser... Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith (udgave 2021)af Richard Bradford (Forfatter)
Work InformationDevils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith af Richard Bradford
   Ingen Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.   ) AChild | Dec 14, 2023 |  Review of the Dreamscape Media LLC audiobook edition (May 18, 2021) narrated by Daniel Henning & released shortly after the Bloomsbury Caravel hardcover & eBook (January 19 & 21, 2021). I chanced upon the beginnings of a potential Highsmith-binge when I recently snapped up The Tremor of Forgery (1969) through a Kindle Deal-of-the-Day. I had previously only read Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (aka Carol) (1952) and the 5 Ripley novels (1955 - 1991). That leaves about 15 novels and a half dozen or more short story collections yet to discover. I also looked for the biographies and saw that Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires... was the most recent, along with a graphic novel Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith (2022) which is an adaptation of the real-life backstory to her writing of the lesbian romance portrayed in The Price of Salt. With these recent books, the recent film Deep Water (2022) and the recent Loving Highsmith (2022) documentary and an upcoming Ripley (late 2023?) TV-series starring Andrew Scott as the murderous Thomas Ripley, it does look like a further Highsmith revival is ongoing/coming, so why not get ahead of it? But caveat emptor about the Bradford biography. It paints just about as ugly a portrait of Highsmith as is possible to do and further spoils the plots of almost all of her novels as it tries to draw parallels between her real-life actions of discarding or ignoring past or current lovers with the murderous antics of her sociopathic protagonists. Bradford also doubts the veracity of much of Highsmith's own diaries and notebooks and constantly tries to make a case for them being fictional fantasies. Admittedly there was plenty to dislike about the real-life Highsmith with her self-destructive alcoholism, mistreatment of lovers and wide-spread racism. Bradford takes this to another level of hate for his own subject though. See photograph at https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/04/19/t-magazine/entertainment/highsmith-fa... Portrait of Patricia Highsmith, circa 1942 by photographer Rolf Tietgens. Image sourced from The Many Faces of Patricia Highsmith, The New York Times Style Magazine, April 19, 2021. So this is a mostly awful bits and little else biography, and the earlier biographies are likely to be preferred (although I haven't read them yet). A further (or alternative) recommended reading list is therefore Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (2009) and Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003). Also intriguing is Marijane Meaker's memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's (2003) and her own early lesbian pulp fiction of Spring Fire (1952) published under the Vin Packer pseudonym. A fictionally murderous Patricia Highsmith is imagined in Jill Dawson's novel The Crime Writer (2016). The narration in the audiobook edition by Daniel Henning felt in keeping with the tone of the material. Footnote * When I was thinking about a lede for this review I remembered the phrase "warts and all" and then looking it up I saw that it is attributed to Oliver Cromwell, who supposedly instructed his portrait painter not to beautify his appearance, but to show even the uglier aspects. Other Reviews Gotcha, Pat! by Terry Castle, London Review of Books, March 4, 2021. When Friends Mean Less than Plots by Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian, January 22, 2021. A Look Into the Dark Inner World of Patricia Highsmith by Charles Green, Lambda Literary, January 22, 2021. The Dangerous World of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Martin, Financial Times, January 28, 2021. Trivia and Links A Patricia Highsmith biographical film documentary was released in 2022 called “Loving Highsmith” directed by Eva Vitija, for which you can see the trailer here. ( ) alanteder | Jul 4, 2023 | A post-script regarding Bradford's approach to his subjects evident in an earlier Hemingway biography: "Hemingway perverted the truth so frequently and habitually that he all but erased his own existence." The idea that a subject cannot be known leaves a lot of room for mischief (and malice) in a biographer. (  ) Lemeritus | Jun 26, 2021 | Bradford does a tremendous amount of research and, probably most important, works back and forth between various sources trying to piece together some kind of story that will be fairly complete and accurate. Part of the problem is that Highsmith, for what seems to be a mixture of intention and simply a strange view of the world, made her diaries and letters as much of a puzzle as some of her stories but without the resolution you expect from a story. To be a fan of Highsmith's is immediately problematic. Her fiction, for the most part, is worthy of praise. But we have a hard time completely separating being a fan of a writer's work from being a fan of the writer. If one makes that distinction then many people will be a fan of her writing only, which would likely have been fine with her. I don't think Bradford overstepped when he made comparisons between Highsmith and her characters, especially Ripley. Unlike the Kirkus reviewer (and the reviewer on the site here who cribbed that review) I don't think calling her a predator is too far-fetched. One doesn't have to even break the law to be a predator. She did, by her own admission, target and plan relationships that would be disruptive to her target's life and other relationships then, also with planning, inflict mental and emotional pain on them. The targeting is, in other words, treating them as prey, which by definition makes her predatory. Reading this was different from most biographies I've read. Namely, in most, the biographer makes decisions on what seems most likely and presents that, with a few places where insurmountable conflicts make such a determination too hard and the biographer shares that dilemma. This is almost dilemma after dilemma. Contradictions between documents, interviews with her and acquaintances, as well as what can be independently verified. There are times when it even appears she added to older entries specifically to make her story that much more convoluted. Bradford shares these difficulties with us, which makes this very much a collaborative book. As readers, we are free to interpret the conflicting evidence in a different manner than he does. I recommend this to readers who like Highsmith's books as well as readers who enjoy problematic public figures. To say it is hard to like who she was is an understatement, but I think we have enough information to feel something, if not positive, at least empathetic about her. I always have a hard time with those hypothetical "who would you invite to a dinner" questions, but I no longer have a problem with at least one name for the "who would you NOT invite to a dinner" question. Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. (  )2  pomo58 | Nov 29, 2020 |
With little sympathy for his subject, Richard Bradford sees the origin of Highsmith’s plots in her destructive relationships with women of higher social standing. It’s possible, but who could ever solve the mystery of creation? It may be relationship drama, or a childhood trauma, or a dream, or a fleeting impression: a face glimpsed in a crowd, a moth circling a light bulb. What makes the present biography poignant, is that there’s no redemption for a life of restlessness, despair, and torturous, doomed affairs. All the pain that drove Highsmith into that no-woman’s-land of loathing and loneliness might have indeed inspired her books. Regardless, here is a life — and, finally, an art — consumed by alcohol and isolation, a reminder that things don’t necessarily work out in the end, even for the most talented among us. Bradford seems overtaken by a kind of reductive mania. If Highsmith’s purported self-revelations are to be taken as more ‘fictional’ than ‘real’ – the flat-character terminology is his own – the opposite, he concludes, is the case with the actual fiction. Highsmith’s novels are more ‘real’ than ‘fictional’: the direct (if unconscious) transcription of some taboo truth about herself that she couldn’t reveal any other way....Bradford’s lurid picture may be accurate up to a point. Highsmith herself recognised the link between the grotesque acts she dramatised in her fiction and some long-standing malevolence in her own nature....But something about Bradford’s unsubtle harping on the murder-by-proxy theme, his prosecutorial tone and absence of counter-balancing sympathy, not to mention his weirdly insistent assertions that Highsmith wasn’t actually a murderer, leave one baffled by his psychic stake here. If she was so sordid and pointless a human being, why write about her? Crime novelist Patricia Highsmith died in 1995, but her reputation has grown substantially over the last 20 years, sparked by a flock of flashy movie adaptations and two first-rate biographies published in the first decade of the current century.... Bradford’s offering, markedly less hefty than its predecessors, relies extensively on both for its factual details.... Bradford seems singularly unappreciative of the consistent quality of Highsmith’s crime fiction, as if his whole enterprise as biographer were a painful duty. Graham Greene, an early fan of Highsmith’s, described her as “the poet of apprehension”. You could not read her, he said, without constantly checking over your shoulder. It was Greene who also said that thing about writers needing a splinter of ice in their hearts, by which he meant the willingness to cannibalise real life, real relationships, real pain in the service of one’s art. Was he thinking of Highsmith? Certainly, on the evidence that Richard Bradford sets out here, Highsmith was an “emotional vandal”, who went out of her way to ruin the lives of her many lovers in order to generate ideas for plots....All of this is fascinating, but it is not really new. Andrew Wilson wrote the first big biography of Highsmith in 2003 based on a meticulous fingertip search of the Bern archive buttressed by interviews with surviving lovers, many of whom have since died. Quite what Bradford brings to the table, unless it is to remind us that this month is Highsmith’s centenary, is unclear.... Bradford is much less interested in [this] sociological approach, preferring to pathologise Highsmith instead....There’s also something odd about the way he deals with what he terms Highsmith’s “lesbian inclinations”.... The result is a biography that manages to be both plodding and salacious at the same time. Richard Bradford’s Devils, Lusts, and Strange Desires is the third biography of Highsmith to emerge in recent years, and it is by far the most lurid. As is clear from the very first page, which stopped me in my tracks, this is a biography that relishes in the worst that Highsmith thought, said and did.... Highsmith’s love life was a roller coaster of attraction, obsession, alcoholism and trauma, but a more nuanced biography would contextualize this toxic brew within the homophobia and misogyny of the time. This is not that biography. Nonetheless, readers looking to immerse themselves in stories of very bad behavior will enjoy this deadly cocktail....
"Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction, has been largely avoided by biographers. She was openly homosexual and wrote the seminal lesbian love story, Carol. In modern times, she would be venerated as a radical exponent of the LGBT community. However, her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers. In this new biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp, incisive style to one of the great and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing."--Amazon. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.44)
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