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Mar 08, 2008

Nora rated it:

Oh Tom Ripley... what to say that hasn't been said dozens of times already? I clipped through the last pages at work tonite, hungry to know! desperate to hold hands with Tom Reeepley as he navigated his way through layer after layer of lie upon lie upon psychopathology! I found myself irked at customers who disturbed my reading, mid-paragraph (inconsiderate indecisive patronizing people! pick out your own damn flowers! take a chance for Christ's sake! No, I don't know what white roses " More...

0 comments like (16 people liked it)

Feb 25, 2008

Adam rated it:

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2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Matthew rated it:

This was a very well written book. I found myself in suspense from the first thought of murder until the last line. I also found that I was in fear of Tom Ripely being caught. I would at times remind myself of his villainy but I would inevitable find myself hoping he would escape and cursing the mistakes that he made.
This is the first in a series of books containing this character which are no doubt as thrilling. I despise him so much though that I don't think I can endure another. Definit More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2012

Alicia rated it:

This is an old Highsmith, and was made into a film with Matt Damon and Jude Law, I think. I very much enjoyed the whole "Ambassadors" update, the rootless Americans taking root in The Old Country. This feature the usual Highsmith ironic and intense prose-- I don't know why no one reads her anymore. She's very, very good, and her melding of the crime genre with a more literary "existential" story makes this both deep and readable. I'm really impressed with how much she managed More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 27, 2011

James rated it:

This engaging novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, is a quirky crime thriller. Highsmith dismisses with many of the traditional aspects of the crime thriller and presents the amoral criminal, one Tom Ripley, from the inside out. From the very first page of the novel you are sharing the thoughts of Tom as he looks over his shoulder expecting the police to emerge from the shadows to take him away. As the novel ends, he is still looking over his shoulder, so to speak, as he imagine More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 30, 2009

aya rated it:

I don't think I've ever been so stressed out reading a book. I thought I was going to lose it about 15 times--I just couldn't see how he was going to get through the entire novel without ending up dead or in jail somewhere. Highsmith is absolutely impeccable at creating intelligent nuanced characters.

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 14, 2010

Giangian rated it:

E poi il fatti che tutto ciò gli era successo due volte prima di allora. E quelle due volte erano stati eventi reali, non frutto della sua immaginazione. Certo, poteva convincersi di non averli veramente voluti, però restava il fatto che li aveva compiuti. Non voleva essere un assassino
Mr. Ripley è forse la creatura più famosa di Patricia Highsmith, grazie anche al film con Matt Damon. Tom è un ragazzo medio americano, un po' anonimo, che vuole piacere a tutti costi, vuol fare il simpatico, vu More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 18, 2011

Richard rated it:

Rating: 4.5* of five

This nail-biting page-turner is the first of Patricia Highsmith's novels featuring amoral, mass-murdering sociopath and all-around bon vivant Tom Ripley.

What can I add to the generations of praise heaped on Highsmith's male alter ego? What else need be said? What delicious evil, what glamourous grue, and told with such economy of language!

Well, for one thing, Tom's as bent as a bow, and because the book came out (!) in 1955 it wasn't possible to More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Oct 31, 2011

Emily added it

You know what sucks? Reading slumps. All the while I've not been blogging over the past few weeks (with the exception of the sex scene entry, which, THANKS, by the way, for all those amazing comments), I bet that some of you were imagining that was due to writer's block or a busy social life or some such thing but I tell you now it's because I've barely picked up a book in all that time. I just can't seem to settle to anything. Whenever this happens to me, which is luckily not often, it make More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 05, 2011

LJ rated it:

First Sentence: Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way.

Tom Ripley has little money left and is very dissatisfied with his life. He also keeps expecting to be arrested for the various frauds he has perpetrated. An offer travel to Italy, all expenses paid, by the father of Dickie Greenleaf comes as a perfect solution. All Tom has to do is convenience Dickie to return to the US and his ailing mother. But Dickie isn’t interesting in go More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 04, 2010

Sarah rated it:

This was a perfect pick to read for Halloween. Although not a typical Horror book, it certainly had horrendous elements to it. Most notably, the inner workings of Tom Ripley's mind. His thoughts are irrational; the only feelings he has towards others are nasty and hateful. He is by far not the smartest, or most talented man who ever lived in fiction, but I'm willing to take a risk and say he is one of the luckiest. Ripley is pure id and maliciousness, but yet, the reader can't help but feel More...

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Apr 21, 2010

Dennis rated it:

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) *****
Splendid psycho/sexual study of a sociopath

Patricia Highsmith, one of the grande dames of the mystery genre, as usual transcends that genre in this meticulously wrought study of a sociopath. The action is set in Europe in the fifties, mostly Italy, at a time when the Yankee dollar bought a whole lot of cappuccino, and an American accent still commanded some respect. In her intense exploration of the 25-year-old Tom Riple More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 03, 2010

Madeline rated it:

Wow. I really enjoyed this book, more than I expected to. Tom Ripley is one creepy son of a bitch sociopath, in a way that Matt Damon (bless his heart) wasn't really able to convey. Nor is Marge quite as obnoxious and silly in the movie as she is in the book. Really, the only person in the movie version who was properly cast was Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf. So yeah: the movie's entertaining and well done, but read the book.

Also, there's one crucial detail in the book that's not in More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 14, 2009

Kellyreaderofbooks rated it:

Mr. Tom Ripley is at a stand-still in his life. Mooching off one friend after another for a place to stay, he has bounced around doing various dead-end jobs. He also has a tax scam going that is entertaining to him, but not lucrative. He seems to have many acquaintances, but very few close friends. Basically, he's stuck in a rut.

Then, he gets a proposal he just can't turn down. Herbert Greenleaf would like Tom to travel to Italy, all expenses paid. Greenleaf's son, Dickie, has been More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2009

Mike rated it:

Closeted homosexual decides to take the facade one step further and dispenses with his humanity entirely. Mr. Ripley's great talent is that he can shed one identity for another like an insect molting a new skin. Unlike later fictional humans-in-form-only, such as Dexter Morgan of Dexter or The Fly’s Seth Brundle, our sociopathic protagonist makes no effort to restore or compensate for his lost humanity — Tom Ripley wants nothing more that to live a life of (stolen) luxury and not be thwarted by More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 08, 2009

Becky rated it:

I saw the Matt Damon/Jude Law/Gwyneth Paltrow movie several years ago and found it only mildly interesting. After reading the terrific Patricia Highsmith book on which the movie was based, I think I need to watch the movie again and compare it to the book.

The book was published in the 1950s, and reads as such. Everyday society was more formal, there were even more class issues than there are today, and the book deals with a rather privileged stratum of 1950s society. For the first ch More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 27, 2009

Eddie rated it:

"Man, damn good book," I mumbled to myself as I turned the last page early this morning, far too early to express more substance or insight through the strange mental fog that renders me zombie-like yet still allows me to read with clarity, as what I read seeps down into my body & soul where nerves are racing and my palms are clammy while person after person files by examining me with suspicion for every indiscretion or deception I've ever committed. Deep in the fog I remember the lies More...

13 comments like (10 people liked it)

Apr 30, 2011

Anthony rated it:

The novel itself, The Talented Mr. Ripley, may not go down in history as one of the greats of American literature, but the story is as iconic as any Greek tragedy. Masquerading as psycho-thriller, Talented is almost a sermon on the Anglo-Saxon class structure, and how when the illusions of that class system are stripped away (birthright, old riche' networks, etc.), morality can be difficult to discern. Is the villain the philandering playboy who ignores his family and lives for the moment, or More...

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May 22, 2010

Jim rated it:

What a delightfully amoral book! I have not read anything like it since Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Tom Ripley is indeed talented, but what is his talent? After reading halfway through The Talented Mr. Ripley, I concluded that it was for finding a likely victim to imitate, imitating him, killing him, and taking over his identity (for a while at least) -- and then fending off all the rather incompetent police and private investigators who question him. (This isn't a spoiler More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 01, 2009

Erin rated it:

Recently, I went to the library book sale as well as to the local used book shop to acquire some cheap paperbacks. It turns out that many of the books that I acquired have been adapted into movies; none of which I have seen. It occured to me that before I begin on reading the many books I've purchased, I should go back and read this book which Doug purchased from Amazon for me.

This intense novel reads like a movie script. Patricia Highsmith is able to create the action as though More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 10, 2009

Andrew rated it:

"He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn't take money, not masses of money, it took a certain security."

More...

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Jun 17, 2011

Taka rated it:

Superb--

Patricia Highsmith's mastery of storytelling is simply mind-blowing. She manages to make a sociopath sympathetic (or at least identifiable) and the story has NOTHING extraneous about it. From the beginning it's full of tension and conflict and every part is necessary. Story-wise, it managed to pummel me with its sheer narrative mastery and floor me.

In a way, it reminds one of Nabakov's Lolita only to the extent that they both make reprehensible, criminal characters sy More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 08, 2011

Sara rated it:

Highsmith begins by showing Ripley as the small-time crook and freeloader that he is - swindling free-lancers by faking IRS calls and letters asserting that they owe more taxes, and living with an acquaintance in a squalid flat where no one will question his receipt of letters under a different name.
Immediately she dives deeper, at his first dinner with the Greenleafs, when he is seized first by fear, then boredom, then an almost panic-stricken need to escape, even as he is enjoying being More...

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Mar 05, 2011

Dree rated it:

In this novel, Highsmith has mastered the art of creepiness.

In New York, Tom Ripley is a small-time con artist. So small-time that he hasn't figured out how to cash the checks he has conned. He can't hold down a job, but has managed to get many jobs (and many very different jobs). He is currently mooching off a friend for a place to stay.

Then one day he is approached in a bar. He thinks the cops have discovered his con--but it is the father of an acquaintance, who has bee More...

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Apr 14, 2009

John rated it:

I'm spoiled from the beginning, having seen the late Anthony Minghella's luminous adaptation circa '99 a few years before snatching this volume at a local bookstore upon seeing the attractive Norton edition lulling my whim alive. Many readers disposed toward Highsmith's original words have a right to be a little frustrated with the moderate revision of Tom Ripley's personality and how it relates to his murderous mind. I'm philosophically spoiled. Minghella's revision makes Ripley much more in More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 05, 2009

Maria rated it:

I remember liking this movie years ago when I first saw it. I never realized it came from a book. I also think the movie is s avery truncated version of the story, but won't know for sure until I watch the movie again. I have to say, I really don't like seeing movie before reading the book. Happily, it's almost always been the reverse but the movie images clash with what I read in the text. I still really enjoy Patricia Highsmith's perspective. She writes about the little nasty bits of hum More...

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Jan 27, 2008

Jennifer rated it:

I really loved the whole Ripley series. It was a guilty pleasure for me - like curling up on the couch with a box of dark chocolate truffles. It's not exactly high brow, but if you're in the mood for a really fun and engaging mystery series this is it.

However, once I finished up all the Ripley books and started to explore some of her other novels and short stories, I was disappointed. I'm still sad that there are no more Ripley books to enjoy:(

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2009

Martin rated it:

This is my first foray into the twisted mind of Tom Ripley and I cannot wait to devour the rest of the series. I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this book - so much more than the movie.

The true sociopathic nature of Ripley is perfectly brought to life through Highsmith's writing. I got a much firmer grip on his egocentric desire to be anything other than himself as I turned each page. I don't know if it was because I've seen the movie but everything really came to life, jumping o More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 15, 2011

M.L. rated it:

1955. Wealthy businessman Herbert Greenleaf follows Tom Ripley into a Manhattan bar and starts a horrific chain of events.

Ripley, who seems to be running from his past, worries he's going to be placed under arrest, but Greenleaf surprises him with an offer to visit Italy and talk his errant son Dickie into coming home.

Ripley has been spending his young adult life trying to become someone else. He hates who he is. Greenleaf falls for one of Ripley's personas and trusts t More...

9 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 19, 2010

Jennifer rated it:

I had seen the movie several years ago and, clueless me, didn't realize it was based on a book. My 8th grader actually brought it home as part of an English class assignment list as they studied the theme of "truth." I found that a bit strange since it seemed like such an adult-oriented book. I decided to give it a read and I'm glad I did. What a great character study! All of the main characters really pull you along but Tom Ripley is the best of them. If you have not seen the movie, r More...

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