Hello to all Highsmith-Fans! Come and join the new german forum of Patricia Highsmith. You may open english threads too. I built the site in june 2003 after I recovered some Highsmith-novels and loved again the suspense she used to create. So have a look at www.patricia-highsmith.de See you there! Birgit

After having read the screenplay and viewed the DVD of the Talented Mr. Ripley, I was much impressed. Decided recently to go back to the source and read the original novel.

I thought the characterization of Riply in the novel were every bit as powerful as in the film. But, I believe the plotting after the murder is superior in the movie.

Found two anomalies or continuity problems in the novel (the American Library vesion).

One: Ripley hides Dickie's passport in his suitcase lining. But at the end, it is discovered in the suitcases full of Dickie's belonging's that Ripley had checked at the Venice American Express under a false name (Farnsworth, I think) for possible later retrieveal.

Two: Late in the novel, when Ripley fears exposure because of the American Express discovery, he is afraid that "all three murders" would be revealed. did I miss something. Who was the third murder victim?

Are these anomalies famous to Highsmith fans, or am I missing something?

Today's New York Times book review section ( Sunday 31 August 2003) features a review of two new biographies of Patricia Highsmith. URL is: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/boo ks/review/31HARRIST.html?8hpib

BELOW ARE FIRST COUPLE OF PARAGRAPHS

August 31, 2003

Patricia Highsmith's Well of Loneliness By ELISE HARRIS BEAUTIFUL SHADOW A Life of Patricia Highsmith. By Andrew Wilson. Illustrated. 534 pp. New York: Bloomsbury. $32.50.

HIGHSMITH A Romance of the 1950s. By Marijane Meaker. 207 pp. San Francisco: Cleis Press. Paper, $14.95.

SINCE the 1999 film adaptation of her novel ''The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' Patricia Highsmith has been gaining posthumous celebrity. American fame evaded her during her lifetime. Her uncomfortable, slightly repellent novels of passivity, humiliation, delusion and futility skitter in a border zone between serious literature, pulp fiction, comic book and psychiatric case study. Charting Highsmith's inner life is a difficult job for a biographer; it seemed to baffle Highsmith herself. She often felt blank, unmoored and frightened. In her diary in 1951, she wrote: ''O who am I? Reflections only in the eyes of those who love me.'' The prospect of a biographer prompted anxiety and dread. She asked two friends to steer off the wrong ones. In ''Beautiful Shadow,'' Andrew Wilson achieves the detachment required to document Highsmith's bizarre personal habits (carrying a purse full of snails, obsessing over human waste disposal) while still appreciating the intellectual and emotional insights she had to give.

Both her intimate life and literary career followed an arc of rapid early rise and slow painful decline. Highsmith, born in Fort Worth in 1921 and raised in New York, was a beauty in her youth; she preferred women sexually, although she preferred men in all other ways. For six months in 1949 she made a futile effort to analyze and ''cure'' herself for her fiance, the novelist Marc Brandel. As it turned out, her private life would be a sexual picaresque. Among her American lovers Wilson names Virginia, Helen, Mary, Allela, Chloe, Natica, another Virginia, Ann, Kathryn, Lynn, Ellen, Mary, Marijane and Daisy.

Hi, I'm a young Patricia Highsmith fan and I'm glad to have finally found some place to talk about her work. Do you realize how many people pretend to be Patricia Highsmith fans and have only seen the Matt Damon movie and not even read a single book of hers? It is so frustrating, it's like dealing with her own characters, such phony people. I was introduced to her through the Matt Damon movie although i came to hate it when i realized how far it deviated from Highsmith's own ideas of Ripley, I really think they undermined the character by making him feel guilt at the end and by making him so genuinely vulnerable when his vulnerability should have only been affected. In the past two years I've read about everything she wrote and i'm down to This Sweet Sickness and The Glass Cell so don't tell me about those, I'm holding off for a while so I still have something new to look forward to. If you have read any of her books besides these and feel like discussing anything, any point, any scene just feel free to right me. I don't want to go on too long so I'll just end by saying that I just finished "Found In The Street" and it comes after about twenty previous Highsmith novels and I never thought I could pick a particular one as her best or my personal favorite but I have to say this is one of the best books I have ever read. I don't get all of it which is partly why I like it so much and Ralph Linderman starts out so hateful and in the end all you can feel is compassion for him which is a testament to Highsmith's genius. I've read critics who try to portray her as some sort of failed Kafka aspirant but I think they are completely wrong, In my opinion Patricia Higmsmith takes Kafka's themes to such a level that you may as well

Hi, no more Highsmith left for me to read... Does anyone have recommendations for similar stuff? I recently read "The Lying Tongue" by Andrew Wilson, who also wrote a biography on her. Looking forward to suggestions!