Beautiful Shadow
“‘The singular Patricia Highsmith has a cool affinity for aberration,’ wrote James Sandoe in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review. ‘Her treatment is internal, not clinical, and this makes for a sharp immediacy rather than a case history . . . It’s not so much that Miss Highsmith makes these proceedings plausible as that she makes them unquestionable. I think the world of Miss Highsmith because while she has me in her firm grasp, she is quite simply the world.’1 Back at her desk, Highsmit...h started to muse on how she could transform the sights and sounds of Europe, particularly her out-of-season trip to Greece, into fiction. ‘I remembered a musty old hotel I had stopped at in Athens, where the service was not very good, where the carpets were worn out, in whose corridors one heard a dozen different languages a day, and I wanted to use this hotel in my book,’ she said. ‘I wanted also to use the labyrinthian Palace of Knossos, which I had visited.’2 She also recalled, from the same trip, feeling ‘slightly rooked by a middle-aged man, a graduate of one of America’s most esteemed universities’; she thought she could use him as a basis for a character, a con-man.MoreLess
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