I have always had a tenderness for writers who do not seek to reassure their readers. Perhaps I feel they are more honest, less sycophantic, in the representation they offer of reality.
I discovered Patricia Highsmith at CEGEP in a detective literature course given by Jean-Marie Poupart, a professor-author who wrote detective literature himself. We had read several irresistible classics of the genre, but I remained attached to Highsmith, who exerted a very lively fascination on the young reader that I was.
I had also read one of his Ripleys (five novels feature him) to my mother, who had not enjoyed reading it. She didn’t like the amoral zone into which the story took her, the confusion that this confusion caused. The world drawn by Highsmith is a world without a moral outcome.
Like some of you, I saw and loved the series Ripley launched in April on Netflix, adapted from the novel Mr. Ripley. Full sun by Steven Zaillian. This little scene, which we also find in the series, sums up, in my opinion, all the ambiguity of the character. After committing a murder, Tom Ripley leaves the apartment and ventures into the streets of Atrani (Mongibello in the novel). He lights a cigarette, then in the same gesture, offers his packet to a homeless man.
Tom doesn’t like killing. He is a murderer by default, almost in spite of himself, to protect his hard-won privileges. Because Tom is a class defector; that is his motive. A sneaky shift is taking place. Suddenly, we understand that we are on his side. Highsmith took us across the line without us realizing it, and by the time we realize it, it’s too late. A delicious uneasiness arises — we almost feel the need to hide. A kind of exquisite and unique disorder, like after too many martinis sipped from a pretty crystal glass from the 1950s. Everything was so elegant, the paintings, the view of the sea, the carefully chosen objects, including this massive cubic ashtray, but now blood is spilling on the floor. The spell is broken. Literature manages to occupy this area wonderfully, even more naturally than the language of images.
Some have questioned the fact that the eight episodes of the series are in black and white. Is this too much? Is this really necessary? Does that bring anything? The finished Patricia Highsmith fan answers yes without hesitation. Beyond further magnifying this world of stunning beauty – small Italian streets, staircases winding like labyrinths, sumptuous and disturbing paintings by Caravaggio – this aesthetic choice erases the color of blood. The victims’ blood here appears iron gray rather than hemoglobin red. The blood becomes stylish, we see it on the screen in the same color as the sea. We are outside the usual code and this is precisely where the moral shift takes place. Here we are “empath” of a psychopath.
Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Texas. An only child, she had a not-so-happy childhood, with a troubled relationship with her mother. She spent part of her life in Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. We often see her in photos sitting at her writing desk in front of her typist, looking monumentally stupid and with a look that transfixes her. It is said that she was a misanthrope, that she loved Siamese cats, and slept with her publisher’s wife. In a photo of her younger, the bangs that fall on her right profile cast shadow on her face… That same piercing look, but something softer.
I’ve read everything about her, and I saw all the adaptations of all her works during a retrospective of her screen universe, presented at the NFB a few years ago. I liked it Full sunRené Clément’s adaptation of Ripley’s debut in crime, with Alain Delon as Tom and Marie Laforêt as Marge, but hated that of Anthony Minghella in 1999 with Matt Damon (The Talented Mr. Ripley). This is because Ripley is an elusive and furtive creature, who must be carried by an actor capable of portraying that – Andrew Scott succeeds in doing so.
While reading, I imagined him as a young Thierry Lhermitte, less histrionic, more dark. The world of Patricia Highsmith was also adapted for the cinema by Win Wenders and by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. In 1951, the latter brought the written word to the screen The unknown of Nord-Expressthe story of a perfect crime, perpetrated on a train, the writer’s first novel, published when she was not yet 30 years old.
This is less known, but Highsmith, the brilliant novelist, is also an extraordinary short story writer. In his Art of suspense (written for writers looking to hone their sense of plot), she says: “Some writers draw their inspiration from big themes (Zola, Victor Hugo), others from the details of everyday life (Maupassant). I think I draw inspiration from both, the detail most often leading me to write a short story, the theme or the “abstract” idea of a novel. »
His news The snail lover was sung by Jean Leloup himself (his song The snail) and tell yourself that this is not the only short story devoted to slimy snails by the writer. We come across terrifying giant snails in this story with a complicated title: In search of “*** Claveringi”. The British writer Graham Greene wrote that “in his short stories, […] rather than slowly encircling the reader, it seeks to quickly deliver the coup de grace.” Mystified, we can only fall into the trap.
Will there be a season 2 of the series Ripley ? I would bet that yes, because you will probably have noticed, during the eighth and final episode, the appearance of John Malkovich in the role of an art dealer with a little “upset” look. » ? Highsmith’s best novel featuring Thomas Ripley is called Ripley and the Shadows and concerns, therefore, the trade in false paintings. Yes, I too can’t wait to see Thomas and Patricia again, even if they make me feel a little psychopathic.