The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

Extracte del punt de lectura del Bookclub (Club de Lectura en Anglès)

What do you think?
What would you do if you didn’t have anything to lose?
How much talent do you think you have?
How would you use that talent?
What do you think ‘wrong’ is?

Comments
Young Tom Ripley, a charming and desperately lonely sociopath from whose point of view the story is revealed, is sent to Italy by Herbert Greanleaf, a businessman desperate for his errant son's return from the Bohemian life and still hoping he will take up family business and responsibilities. Dickie Greenleaf, a beautiful, careless embodiment of the idle upperclass, represents everything that Tom has always felt he deserved but has never had.
Bored and solitary in New York, Tom embraces his chance to start a new and glorious life. Using his talents for mimicry and an honest, blundering mask, Tom charms Dickie and manages to gain his trust and friendship days after arriving.
Ripley, pleased with himself, settles in to enjoy his newfound "brother" and greatly improved lifestyle.
As Ripley ingratiates himself further and further into Dickie's life, falling in love with every aspect of his existence, he is also repeatedly reminded of his own inadequacies and how he doesn't fit in this world as he thought he should.

The Author
Highsmith (1921-1995), was an American author who started her writing career by creating stories for comic book publishers.
Capote suggested her to rewrite her first novel, Strangers on a Train, which was modestly successful but Hitchcock adapted it into a movie in 1951 and Highsmith’s career catapulted.
Soon she became known as a writer of ironic, disturbing psychological mysteries highlighted by stark, startling prose.
Among other novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley was also adapted into a movie by French director René Clement and with Alain Delon playing the main character (Plein sleil, aka Purple Noon).
Lesbian herself, in her novels, we can find homosexual undertones, which is the main theme in The Price of Salt and Small g, being the former the first of its kind with a happy ending.
Her characters are usually morally compromised by circumstance or actively flouting the law. Many of her antiheroes, often emotionally unstable young men, commit murder in fits of passion
Ripley is the main character of 5 of her novels, known as the Ripliad.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

Bibliography
The Ripliad

• The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1955
• Ripley Under Ground, 1970
• Ripley’s Game, 1974
• The Boy Who Followed Ripley, 1980
• Ripley Under Water, 1991

Partial bibliography

• Strangers on a Train, 1950
• The Price of Salt, 1953
• The Blunderer, 1954
• Deep Water, 1957
• A Game for the Living, 1958
• The Sweet Sickness, 1960
• The Two Faces of January, 1961
• The Cry of the Owl, 1962
• The Glass Cell, 1964
• Edith’s Diary, 1977
• Small g: a Summer Idyll, 1995

Short Story collections

• Eleven, 1970
• Little Tales of Misogyiny, 1974
• Mermaids on the Golf Course, 1985

The Movie

• Director: Anthony Minghella
• Matt Damon ... Tom Ripley
• Gwyneth Paltrow ... Marge Sherwood
• Jude Law ... Dickie Greenleaf
• Cate Blanchett ... Meredith Logue
• Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Freddie Miles
• Jack Davenport ... Peter Smith-Kingsley
• James Rebhorn ... Herbert Greenleaf
• Sergio Rubini ... Inspector Roverini
• Philip Baker Hall ... Alvin MacCarron
• Celia Weston ... Aunt Joan
• Ivano Marescotti ... Colonnello Verrecchia
• Anna Longhi ... Signora Buffi
• Alessandro Fabrizi ... Sergeant Baggio