The Blunderer - Softcover

Highsmith, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322440 ISBN 13: 9780393322446

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing...bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night." ―The New Yorker

For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Review:

''Highsmith's The Blunderer, like her well-remembered Strangers on a Train has a striking plot idea: a curious intertwining of the motives and methods of two deaths, so complex that it defies brief synopsis.'' --New York Times

''Has much of the malevolent intensity of Strangers On A Train and the whim of circumstance does much to victimize Walter Stackhouse, a lawyer . . . Clever.'' --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

''Offer[s] more of Highsmith's signature characters in plots where fairly ordinary people perform extraordinary acts of brutality.'' --Library Journal

''For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.'' --Time

''Almost unputdownable. Miss Highsmith writes about men like a spider writing about flies''. --The Observer

''Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing ...bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.'' --The New Yorker

''One of the greatest modernist writers.'' --Gore Vidal

''My suspicion is that when the dust has settled and when the chronicle of 20th-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid, as we should place Dostoevsky at the top of the Russian hierarchy of novelists.'' --A.N Wilson Daily Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393322440
• ISBN 13: 9780393322446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288