Rating: 
Summary: excellent case study of madness love obsession
Review: again, another wonderful patricia highsmith book, she is a genius at the understatement in writing. her books are slow to getinto, its true but once you are there you are there, right inside the characters minds and the twisty plots and the ever so slightly change of reality she proposes. an excellent little french movie of the same name, starring gerard depardu is a good follow up to the story. and read mr ripley the ultimate psycopath and ever so nice man.
Rating:
Summary: How love can make people sick....
Review: By far the weakest Highsmith effort. Tedious to the point of eyestrain, with a prose "style" that waffles between cliche and camp. I was dis-dis-disappointed. Glacial pace. The book is redeemed by its final forty pages--the very end is quite moving, actually. But how many times can we read (paraphrase): __Wes clapped David on the shoulder. "Have a drink, Dave, and forget about that girl for a while." David felt a rush of anger spread to his cheeks. Forget about Annabelle? He had her name tattooed on his ass! He looked again at Wes's pleading eyes, then again at Effie's maudlin, pitiful face. A rush of anger welled within him and spread to his nose. He would leave the house at once! He needed socks, knit socks, more of Mrs. Beecham's knit socks. He ordered two martinis and retired to his room to masturbate furiously over Annabelle's 50th non-existent letter.__
Rating: 
Summary: Dull Camp
Review: By far the weakest Highsmith effort. Tedious to the point of eyestrain, with a prose "style" that waffles between cliche and camp. I was dis-dis-disappointed. Glacial pace. The book is redeemed by its final forty pages--the very end is quite moving, actually. But how many times can we read (paraphrase): __Wes clapped David on the shoulder. "Have a drink, Dave, and forget about that girl for a while." David felt a rush of anger spread to his cheeks. Forget about Annabelle? He had her name tattooed on his ass! He looked again at Wes's pleading eyes, then again at Effie's maudlin, pitiful face. A rush of anger welled within him and spread to his nose. He would leave the house at once! He needed socks, knit socks, more of Mrs. Beecham's knit socks. He ordered two martinis and retired to his room to masturbate furiously over Annabelle's 50th non-existent letter.__
Rating: 
Summary: A strange story of sexual obsession and deteriorating sanity
Review: David Kelsey is a scientist whose unrequited love for a woman named Annabelle has not diminished over time, even though she has gone on to marry another man and give birth to a baby. Highsmith's protagonist--like most Highsmith protagonists--has a sense of perverse righteousness and a profound freight of guilt that he carries everywhere. The dreariness of the setting--largely a rooming house in a sad little upstate New York town--creates a nice counterpoint for this tale of consuming love and delusion. The final pages of the book, which take David into full-scale psychosis, are truly stark and believable. This, we feel, must be what it's like to be insane. And the last line of the book is, well, a killer
Rating:
Summary: An excellent novel
Review: Earlier a reviewer wrote that Highsmith "hated men." This is entirely untrue: If you read her biography by Wilson, which includes excerpts and information from her diary, you will see that in fact she was a huge fan of the male sex and considered males superior in many respects to females. Many of the female characters in her books were problems for her to develop (one example from her diary is Heloise in the Ripley books) because she didn't feel she could identify with them. Very few of her protagonists, consequently, are female.
This Sweet Sickness exhibits first and foremost Highsmith's ability to deal with human emotion and the depth of the human psyche in her literature. The protagonist's desperation throughout the novel is obvious to the reader, although it does not actually fully surface until he starts to slip in the final chapter, and this exemplifies Highsmith's style. The police chase through Central Park is one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever read, and the climax that follows is successfully and powerfully tragic.
This Sweet Sickness is a terrific novel that follows the usual Highsmith "formula" but with a unique, and heartbreaking ending. A recommended read.
Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: Highsmith didn't like men and it seems evident again in this book. But she could write and damn well too.
Rating:
Summary: The madman
Review: The book "The Sweet Sickness" is written of Patricia Highsmith. It deals with a man (David) who is head over heels in love with Annabelle. They were a couple in the past, but now Annabelle is married. David can not forget her. He writes her a lot of letters and he also tries to meet her. But without any success she don't want him, he gets crazier and crazier and at least he kills two people but not on purpose. In the book David lives a double life.
I like the book because of the excitement, all the time something happens and it's not boring to read it. On account of the different interpersonal relations the book gets very interesting. I think you can put yourself in the place of David and for this reason you live with him and hope he gets Annabelle back. You have compassion of him. I also like the style which Highsmith chose for her book.
Rating:
Summary: How love can make people sick....
Review: The book This Sweet Sickness plays in the United States and is about David Kelsey, a young scientist who is obsessed with Annabelle, a married woman with whom he once had a short relationship.
His life is split up in two parts, during the weeks David lives in a boarding house. Every weekend he pretends to go visiting his ill mother but instead of that he goes to his house which he has bought under another name, William Neumeister. At his house he imagines a life with Annabelle.
During the book, David always tries to win Annabelle over. He writes to her hoping to persuade her to meet him and phones her very obstinately. He refuses to believe that she loves her husband Gerald and not him. One day, Gerald has enough of David's calls and letters. He gets drunk and comes to see David at his house. There they have a quarrel and unfortunately Gerald dies. David begins to lead a double-life for to confuse the police. His life becomes very complicate but he succeeds for a long time that the police don't realize that David Kelsey and William Neumeister are the same person. Only when there is a second death caused by David, the police come to the right conclusion. During the whole story, David doesn't resign trying to win over Annabelle...
It's really interesting to read this book and to feel with a common man who is obsessed with a woman he will never be able to reach...
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Review: This is an quite interesting story about a man's desperate love for a girl that is out of his reach. It also contains some psychological aspects which give an even more thrilling touch to the novel. Patricia Highsmith perfects the art of transporting the reader into a dangerous, double-edged world of crime and lies. It's absolutely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: How sweet it is
Review: This is without question Patricia Highsmith's finest novel. A tale of difficult love (apparently a running theme in Highsmith's work, whether negative -- as here -- or positive -- as in SMALL G: A SUMMER IDYLL) and declining sanity, and overall, as Graham Greene put it, apprehension. We wait for things to happen and oh, how we are rewarded. So, the setup is: David Kelsey, a young (late-twenties) chemist who lives in a boarding-house in Froudsburg, NY, is desperately in love with Annabelle, who loved him once but has now married Gerald, who David sees as a boor unworthy of her. He anticipates her leaving Gerald and living with him -- so much so he's bought a house in a neighboring town, fully furnished it, even including pictures of her; it waits while he continues to call her and send her letters -- which enrages Gerald, who finds out about the other house and goes to it while David's there in order to kill (or at least harm) him. David kills him, instead -- by accident, and kind of in self defence, though -- and informs the police in the other town under the name he bought the house by: William Neumeister. His friends -- and Annabelle -- don't know about Neumeister, the police don't know of David's life as himself in Froudsburg, and so he has to try to keep them both in the dark of either "person." And everything starts sliding downhill from there. The tension is superbly built as the novel progresses, after the start creates a very palpable air of uneasiness in establishing The Situation (what David calls Annabelle's being married). And while, as others pointed out, the police are fairly incompetent here, it doesn't entirely detract from the novel -- although it may bother you with its lack of logic when you read it. But it's soon lost as the novel continues. What makes it so good is that rather than dealing with mere criminal tendencies, we find ourselves plunged with David headlong into the world of insanity -- which you don't usually in a Highsmith novel, at least not in the sense here; if the murdering is in Highsmith's other books is a form of insanity, it at least seems connected to reality. But here . . . The last 30 or so pages must be perhaps the most stunning portrayal of insanity ever written. (Of course, I may be wrong there, but it's still amazing as it stands.) It all leads to an incredible ending. So the last quarter of the book or so is worth the price of the entire book alone. Read it NOW.
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