Questions About This Sweet Sickness

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Does anyone else think that Annabelle has a lot to answer for? I found myself empathizing more with David than with her--which is what Highsmith intended, I think.

Jean-Luc Fromental Hello, I'm a massive Highsmith reader and I just reread this great novel of hers. To comment on your remark, I'd say that, as is usual in her work, Hi…moreHello, I'm a massive Highsmith reader and I just reread this great novel of hers. To comment on your remark, I'd say that, as is usual in her work, Highsmith sympathies go to the deranged mind, i.e. David's, and even if she doesn't charge Annabelle with any specific wrong, her way of describing her as an appallingly banal, mundane young woman, with none of the grandiose qualities her hero sees in her, showing her two husbands as frighteningly vulgar, her expectations and aspirations as utterly plain, is there to give the measure of David's delusion. It's the very nature of what is so unsettling in the novel, that such a bright learned mind can lure itself into believing this is an exceptional woman to be had at all costs. I believe it's a formidable description of this sickness well known by psychoanalysts, called "erotomania". There lies the genius of Ms Highsmith : to put her reader in empathy with a deeply sick mind, to make you feel and experience the very fabric of madness. (less)

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