Price of salt.

Call me a loser for not getting as excited about Benedict Anderson or Kant, but it's been a while since I picked up a book and literally could not put it down. I'm no romantic, in fact, I avoid romantic literature like the plague, because no one, that is, no one but Patricia Highsmith apparently, can capture the thrill of the crush, or the torture of romantic obsession. This book is more than a lesbian harlequin paperback though- I can just hear tomorrow's class discussion already. Unfair. It's still Sunday.
As the product of 12 years of Catholic school and countless nuns, a former struggling artist in New York City, a former dissatisfied girlfriend, and former sugar-baby, I feel particularly well-qualified to speak on the matter.
Fantasies are our escape from the drudgery of daily life. For a character like Therese, fantasies are an escape from the horror implicit in the human condition. That's the paradoxical magic of the city. One's wildest dreams and worst nightmares can be on the same block, in the same apartment building. She is written in an interesting way, however. We hear her thoughts and desires, but still understand her as removed, removed from us, removed from the social expectations that she could never fulfill. We understand her, but can in no way predict her next desperate move. And Carol, Carol is written exactly as Therese sees her. With penciled eyebrows, slinking around in silk with a snifter of brandy and incessant cigarettes. The gay divorceé. How could you not love a woman(or want to be), a woman like that. Sign me up. And through Therese, we are able to live out that ultimate fantasy- that daydream becoming reality. Not that it's easy. Not that it ever is. The tension that Highsmith lets build in the first 100 pages of this book is frustrating only because it is real: it's release only heightens the rush of the eventual romantic encounter. But what does it cost?