Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (Book Review)

"The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm."

Review: What an amazingly well written, spellbinding, rollercoaster ride of a book! And for all the reasons I usually end up not liking a movie that is based on a book too!

Usually I try to read a book before I see the movie. So far my record is heavily sided with reading the book first, but if it's a classic such as Strangers on a Train, it bound to happen that I've seen the movie first. The same thing happened with To Kill a Mockingbird, but I'm digressing. Going back to this book, let me start by saying, except for the title and character names the book and movie are polar opposites! Oh, and the starting plot, such as the discussion that takes place between the "strangers" on the train (see what I did there?) is the same. And I think it's because of the liberties (or lack thereof) that Alfred Hitchcock took in directing Strangers on a Train, that I can love both equally and appreciate them separately without taking anything away from each other.

As you all may know, this is was a collaborative read between myself and Alaina. And because she has recently undertaken reading the hefty Game of Thrones as a collaborative effort with another college friend of ours, it might be a while before we endeavor to do another. Although I will say, her pick was so awesome this go-round that I'm inclined to entrust her with the next pick! With the caveat that William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back obviously be among one that we do soon!

After discussing our favorite Hitchcock films we promptly began dissecting the novel thusly:

@NYCBookWorm84 Um, the major flaw being himself?? #TheCollaborators
— Alaina Patterson (@WillBeFunOrElse) May 1, 2014

No matter how you look at it, this book is an excellent guide on what could be the perfect crime of murder. Provided one of the two parties involved is not a complete and total schizo! I think Alaina would agree with me there?

@NYCBookWorm84 He was so obsessed with Guy that he endangered the both of them. #TheCollaborators
— Alaina Patterson (@WillBeFunOrElse) May 1, 2014

We seemed to have very little to say about the women in the book, of which there were four of! See, the main point to this suspense novel is that Bruno (the schizo) dreams of killing his father. He has come up with the perfect way of doing it where no one will get caught. How, you might ask? Simple. He'll meet a complete stranger, say, on a train. This stranger will, like Bruno, have someone in his life that, if they were eliminated, would make his life better. That's where Guy comes in. He's got a wife who also happens to enjoy fooling around on him, but won't divorce him. Guy wants the divorce so that he may marry Anne, a woman he actually loves and cares for deeply, and who, unlike Miriam, isn't sleeping around on him. The other two women are the mothers' of each of our main characters.

Bruno's mom, to me, seemed to have a sort of Norma & Norman Bates kind of relationship going on. I always felt like there was something just not right with that mother-son dynamic. Then there was Guy's mother, who is there for her son, caring, nurturing, but more of a mother than a best friend.

Of course there's a bit more to the story, but the whole idea is what happens inwardly to both Guy and Bruno after murder is committed. To make one more analogy, that I just thought of now, Bruno reminds me of that dude in The Tell Tale Heart and how he would have behaved if that short story dragged out much longer.

This is the kind of book that should be used in some creative writing college course. Analyzed and torn apart for self-reflection. I think I would have enjoyed comparing Guy and Bruno as some sort of thesis.

Synopsis: With the acclaim for The Talented Mr. Ripley, more film projects in production, and two biographies forthcoming, expatriate legend Patricia Highsmith would be shocked to see that she has finally arrived in her homeland. Throughout her career, Highsmith brought a keen literary eye and a genius for plumbing the psychopathic mind to more than thirty works of fiction, unparalleled in their placid deviousness and sardonic humor. With deadpan accuracy, she delighted in creating true sociopaths in the guise of the everyday man or woman. Now, one of her finest works is again in print: Strangers on a Train, Highsmith's first novel and the source for Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1953 film. With this novel, Highsmith revels in eliciting the unsettling psychological forces that lurk beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

256 pages

W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

mystery / suspense

Read in 5 days

Rating: ★★★★

Amazon | BN

To learn more about Patricia Highsmith visit her Wikipedia page here.

The Trial by Franz Kafka (Book Review)

The Trial

by Franz Kafka

231 pages

Schocken Books, August 2011 (reprint)

philosophical fiction/dystopian fiction/absurdist fiction

Read in 9 days

My Rating: ★★★★

Amazon.com | BN.com

My Review: I had several reasons for wanting to read this book, besides always wanting to read a book written by Franz Kafka, I’ve seen the movie of The Trial and want to compare them to each other. If you’ve ever seen an Orson Welles movie you will understand how intrigued I was to see if what Orson visualized was, in fact, what Franz wrote down? I am pleased to report the strangeness of Orson Welles adaptation of The Trial appears to be spot on when it comes to peculiarities.

You must first understand that The Trial was originally written in German, printed in 1925, and translated dozens of time. A lot of the authors original intent for their piece of work can get lost when it’s been translated as many times as this masterpiece has been. For the sake of not knowing anything about Kafka and his works I did read the LONG introduction that came along with the book. It’s not required in order to read The Trial but it was helpful. For instance, the fact that the chapters have no numbers, just titles, because one of the main mix-ups with the many hands this work passed through is it lost the order with which it was intended to be presented in. It also was never actually finished by Kafka! This shocked me the most since it is known (next to Metamorphosis) as the best thing he’s ever written.

What I found most interesting about this book is how it can easily be used as an explanation for how so many millions of people just blindly went along with what happened over 15 years after this work was published! I’ve always wondered what went on in the minds of those who were persecuted against that they never rose up against the Nazis? Joseph K.’s reaction to his being “arrested” and put on trial for a crime he claimed innocence of, without ever knowing the charge, serves as the best singular example. Multiply his compliance and acceptance by millions and there is as best an answer as I can see.

I also question the meaning behind the friendships he so easily makes with the many women he encounters in this book. I noticed that the women seem to genuinely want to help while the male characters seem hesitant, not wanting to risk guilt by association.

If you are going to read this book there are just a few items I’d like to bring to your attention. When translating this work from German to English there were a few liberties the translators had to take. For one, the addition of commas. You never know just how crazy a run on sentence can get if you don’t add them! And let me tell you, these sentences can end up being a paragraph long at times! Something I noticed right away. And speaking of paragraphs, they are just as few and far between as the commas were before translation. I’m someone who, if I can’t finish on a chapter before I have to stop reading, I’d like to at least finish off whatever paragraph I’m on. That plan was not possible with this book. I do not fault the original writer (who has a far superior and brilliant mind than my own) nor do I fault the translator (who truly did work painstakingly in order to preserve the authors original intent). I fault myself for being so darn picky!

Read it, love it, and before you file it away on your list of “Classic Books I’ve Read” check out the movie! Directed by Orson Welles, who also co-stars in it, alongside the ever creepy Anthony Perkins (if you don’t recognize the name, just think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and you’ll know who I’m talking about).

Summary: This disturbing and vastly influential novel has been interpreted on many levels of structure and symbol; but most commentators agree that the book explores the themes of guilt, anxiety, and moral impotency in the face of some ambiguous force. Joseph K. is an employee in a bank, a man without particular qualities or abilities. He could be anyone, and in some ways he is everyone. His inconsequence makes doubly strange his arrest by the officer of the court in the large city where K. lives. He tries in vain to discover how he has aroused the suspicion of the court. His honesty is conventional; his sins, with Elsa the waitress, are conventional; and he has no striking or dangerous ambitions. He can only ask questions, and receives no answers that clarify the strange world of courts and court functionaries in which he is compelled to wander. The plight of Joseph K., consumed by guilt and condemned for a crime he does not understand by a court with which he cannot communicate, is a profound and disturbing image of man in the modern world. There are no formal charges, no procedures, and little information to guide the defendant. One of the most unsettling aspects of the novel is the continual juxtaposition of alternative hypotheses, multiple explanations, different interpretations of cause and effect, and the uncertainty it breeds. The whole rational structure of the world is undermined.

A respectable banker gets arrested and spends his life fighting a charge he can not get information about.