Wednesday, July 6, 2011

I got mail


Few other pleasures equal to the one of receiving a book in the mail, by a friend, while at work.
I have never read any of her books, but apparently Andrew Wilson's shortlisted for the Whitbread award biography of Patricia Highsmith is a good start because it reads like a novel and because it includes her letters, diaries and notebooks found after her death.
Although Graham Greene described her as the "poet of apprehension", and Gore Vidal as one of the finest American modernists writers, her novels found a warmer welcome in Europe than her homeland and maybe the Dictionary of Mystery writers can in part tell us why it was so when , under Highsmith, we read, quote: " It has been said that Highsmith's work evokes horror, fear and guilt, but the guilt is all in the mind of the reader; it is the lack of guilt that makes the stories horrifying." As she said in her 'Plotting and writing suspense fiction' , she felt that, quote: " Art has nothing to do with morality, convention or moralizing".....interesting gal.
It should be an interesting read.