 "Everything you could want from a novel" | 2009-09-26 |
| - Reviewed By User: AZA3Z5DFYXO9F |
Carol/ The Price of Salt was originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952, before this reviewer was born, but it feels far more relevant than many novels I have read, lesbian or straight, because Patricia Highsmith is the kind of writer with the kind of almost creepy sense of detail that makes you feel like you are present and experiencing everything the protagonist is experiencing, from the sore feet from working too long hours at the department store to the moment she falls in love with a customer.
"Her mouth was as wise as eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets."
Therese is poor and young, dating a young man, and Carol is rich, beautiful, and ... married, with a young child and a husband who is very possesive, vindictive and cruel.
The novel turns into a love story, a thriller, and also into a young woman's journey into independence and her quest to do what she is meant to do; be who she is meant to be; love the woman she cannot stop loving, regardless of social norms, or differences in ages, and regardless of differences in social background, and despite all kinds of prejudice and threats.
The Price of Salt, or Carol, is one of my absolute favourite novels, all genres, all times, and also my favourite Patricia Highsmith novel.
L. Holm author of Fairytales for Femmes |
| |
| "Best book I've ever read" | 2009-04-26 |
| - Reviewed By User: ANRA98884FEAQ |
I read this book for the first time a year ago, not knowing beforehand that it was written in the early 1950s. The subject matter is very daring and intense. I'm not even referring to the lesbian part; I'm talking about the age gap. Also (spoiler, sorta), over 50 years later, there is still an issue with single women losing their children in divorce because of their sexuality (end spoiler.)
The Price of Salt is beautifully written, classy, unique and timeless in many regards. I love reading it. I frequently wish that Patricia Highsmith had produced more books like this one, but I guess why do that if you got it right the first go round? |
| |
| "Awsome Book Ever!!!!" | 2009-04-24 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2EBMNKU8G40MS |
Once I started reading it, I cannot resist put down the book. Until I finished reading the book and felt relieve, because Therese finally able to live with Carol as what she wished the first time she met her at the Department Store. I recommend this book to whoever likes lesbian story.
|
| |
 "Good Novel, Strong Love Story" | 2008-10-06 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1B3CT7HFKCXY9 |
| Unlike Terry Castle of "The New Republic", I'm not convinced that Nabokov used Carol and Therese's trip in "The Price of Salt" as a template for the extended "vacation" that Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze took in "Lolita". If he did, he expanded it in richness and depth about a thousand-fold. "The Price of Salt", while no "Lolita", is an interesting work in its own right. Carol and Therese meet in the toy section of the department store where the latter works; they embark on a friendship, and fall in love. Carol happens to be married, albeit unhappily. She also happens to have a young daughter. It takes the two quite awhile to sleep together, so those in search of quick, cheap thrills will undoubtably be disappointed. And when they finally do, Highsmith's prose drifts into the nebulous vagaries of poetry, reminding us that this was, indeed, written in the 1950's. The novel is, first and foremost, a literary love story. It is not in any way, shape, or form, a sex manual.br /While "The Price of Salt" didn't seize and possess me the way Jane Rule's "Desert of the Heart" did--which isn't all bad--I felt it gradually insinuating itself into my mental nooks and crannies. (And what lesbian, repressed or not, could turn these strange, detailed pages without wanting, at least a little, to take Therese's place one night in one of those not-so-anonymous hotel rooms?) br /The ending, I have to say, is rather abrupt. It left me with the exasperating "That's it!?" sensation--you know the feeling. All and all, though, "The Price of Salt" is a solid novel featuring a strong love story, made even more compelling because of the taboo nature of homosexuality at the time. |
| |
| "The Price was Worth It" | 2008-06-14 |
| - Reviewed By purrvyk |
| I love Patricia Highsmith with her sadistic view of human nature. Her description of the character's boyfriend (his forehead reminding her of a whale and his hands looking like paws) was hilarious. She is an excellent writer who uses similes and metaphors well. Not to mention the unconventional story for that day and time! |
| |
| "A love story that's surprising --- for how good it is" | 2008-03-20 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1725KPO7A5ULX |
It's Christmas, and money's tight, so Therese Belivet does what any unemployed 19-year-old stage designer might --- she takes a temp job in the toy department of a Manhattan department store. Her days define dreary. The aging sales clerks seem "stricken with an everlasting exhaustion and terror." As for her customers, they're also desperate, but for a doll, any doll.
Then Mrs. H.F. Aird walks in.
Calm gray eyes. Blonde. Pale, thin ankles. Suede high heels. Her voice was "like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets."
Therese has a boyfriend, who "talked like any of the people one saw in Village bars, young people who were supposed to be writers or actors, and who usually did nothing." After ten months, they aren't growing closer. This isn't love.
But Mrs. H. F. Aird --- what is that attraction?
Therese sends a card that says nothing much. But just sending it is provocative. Carol Aird, 32 and unhappily married and a mother, responds. And so it begins...
Patricia Highsmith, known for thrillers that show how easily evil can masquerade as goodness, wrote "The Price of Salt" right after Strangers on a Train. She was short of cash, so she took a job in a department store. A cool beauty walked in. After she left, Highsmith felt "cool and swimmy" in her head; that night, she wrote an eight-page outline. Her publisher had been pressing her for another suspense novel, but she said that she didn't regard "Strangers on a Train" as suspense --- and she considered this new plot, she has written, "simply a novel with an interesting story."
That is so disingenuous. This was the late 1940s and early 1950s, and even in wicked New York, Highsmith notes, "those were the days when people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being homosexual." So to write a love story about two women --- could Highsmith have been completely surprised when Harper & Bros. rejected it?
The happy ending: A "specialty" press published "The Price of Salt" --- under the byline of "Claire Morgan" --- in paperback in 1952.
It sold a million copies.
It deserved to. In a swift 275 pages, Highsmith creates a world that's seems entirely plausible. First, there's the love story: the push-pull of the flirting, the heart-stopping looks, the thrill of a touch. Then there's the suspense aspect. Divorce wasn't no-fault anywhere in America in the early 1950s; it was a time of private detectives and blame. And so, when Carol and Therese take a trip, they're not alone --- Mr. Aird's private eye follows. This is not a romance without consequences.
And, of course, there is the sex.
But do not think for a second that this book has appeal only to women who love women --- or men who get off on lesbian sex.
There is, in fact, almost no sex in the novel. This is not a book about Tab A and Slot B, and then Tab A being banished.
And that is its power. The book is about two women coming to terms with forbidden love --- about wanting to be together and having trouble saying how much they want that, and being scared and having misunderstandings. It's got all the stuff of a love story between heterosexuals. Just with higher stakes. And an ending that's surprising...
"I never wrote another book like this," Highsmith said.
Well, you never read one like this.
|
| |
International Available
