The Blunderer - Softcover

Highsmith, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322440 ISBN 13: 9780393322446

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

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

Review:

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)

Book Description:

First published in 1953, The Blunderer is often hailed as Highsmith's finest novel, about the rise and fall of a faithful suburban husband who plots his wife's demise in fantasies gruesome and eerily serene.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393322440
• ISBN 13: 9780393322446
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288