your own slow smile grows…

Book review:

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: Must Have Books, 1952,2021

166 pages

“…(Carol’s) slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly,

her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before.

Therese walked toward her.”

As you read the last words of The Price of Salt, your own slow smile grows. It’s a love story that ends happily.

The story of the love story is challenging—it embraces peaks of happiness and vales of sadness and anger. Like every love story, I guess.

Carol and Therese are different personalities, they imagine different lives—but they never stop seeing their future lives together after their completely serendipitous first meeting. They never stop struggling to get to the future. Therese says: “Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations.”

Highsmith tells a compelling story, but she makes the reader work for it. The prose is congested, there are quirky side trips in the action, the men in their lives are more caricature than personality, and both Carol and Therese repeatedly invite the reader’s patience as they try to think about what they’re thinking about.

It doesn’t stop the smiles from growing.

* * * * * *

Book review: The Comanche Empire

the other story of the American West…

by Pekka Hämäläinen

click here

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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”