The boy who followed Ripley

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The boy who followed Ripley (OT: The Boy Who Followed Ripley ) is a mystery novel of the American writer Patricia Highsmith in the year 1980 . It is the penultimate part of the five-part ripliad about the protagonist Tom Ripley , which began with the book The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). The German translation was published in the same year by the Swiss Diogenes Verlag .

action

Tom Ripley still lives - as he did in Ripley Under Ground - in the French village of Villeperce-sur-Seine near Paris . He is married to the wealthy heiress Héloise Plisson and spends his days painting, gardening, harpsichord lessons and idling in the splendid Belle Ombre country estate . One day in his regular café he met a 16-year-old American teenager who pretended to be "Billy" and claimed to spend the summer in Europe as a gardener. Tom takes the boy out to dinner, but has his doubts about the boy's true identity. In fact, he quickly confesses that he, Frank, the son of the multi-million dollar grocery wholesaler John Pierson sen. who had a fatal accident in his wheelchair a few weeks ago. The Pierson family is already looking for the missing Frank via the newspaper and private detective. When Tom drops the boy down in front of his rented room in the evening and the landlady reports that strangers have asked about Frank, Tom suspects that the billionaire's son is already being watched by international kidnappers who are trying to extort ransom, and in the blink of an eye he closes him up Home a.

The two become friends and after a few days, with tears, Frank admits to Tom that he deliberately pushed his father down the cliffs in front of the family's summer home in Maine . Tom Ripley recognizes himself in the boy and remembers his first murder of Dickie Greenleaf . He decides to help him and gets him a false passport in the name of Benjamin Andrews . Since he is certain that Frank is being hunted by gangsters in Europe, he wants the boy to return to the USA quickly , especially since he is not officially suspected of the murder of his father there. He promises him a trip to West Berlin ; Frank is supposed to fly home from Germany. The two spend wonderful days in Berlin.

One day before Frank leaves for New York , they are walking along the rubble mountain in the Grunewald when Frank is kidnapped by some men in a dark blue Audi. Tom has to watch helplessly, but he immediately turns to a Berlin acquaintance of his friend Reeves Minot, Eric Lanz, whom he had stayed for a night in Belle Ombre a few weeks ago. Together with Eric and his driver and bodyguard Peter, a refugee from East Berlin, he wants to free Frank from the clutches of the kidnappers. Ripley contacts the Pierson family and their private detective in Paris. He withdraws the ransom that the Piersons are sending to Berlin and goes with Eric and Peter to hand over the money. The kidnappers are amateurish. Tom shoots a kidnapper with Peter's pistol and the handover fails. There should be another meeting in the gay bar Hump . Another friend of Eric, Max, provides Tom with women's clothes, and he sneaks into the bar disguised as a transvestite and manages to identify the kidnappers. He follows them when they leave again without any money. He was able to free the uninjured Frank from an apartment and traveled with the boy back to America via Hamburg, Paris - where the family met - and Belle Ombre . Tom is hailed as a savior by the Piersons and spends a few days in Kennebunkport, Maine in the Piersons' summer home. But Frank is melancholy and finally throws himself to his death at the same spot where he killed his father. Tom takes the incident more than he ever thought. He returns to Villeperce and keeps a teddy bear as a souvenir of the boy, which Frank won at a fair in Berlin.

background

Patricia Highsmith made the first notes on a new Ripley band in September 1976: In one of the first scenes designed, Tom Ripley fights wooden ants in his house and meets a boy in the village who is said to have killed his great-uncle. With the pest control, Highsmith finally had the final version of the book begin and end, and the murder of his great-uncle became the murder of Frank's father a year later.

The bisexual high smith plays with many elements of homosexuality in this Ripley band: Ripley's wife Héloise becomes suspicious when the older Tom spends a lot of time alone with the teenage Frank. Frank sleeps in Tom's bed, gives his rescuer a red silk bathrobe. The scene of the action in the last third of the novel is the Berlin gay scene, including transvestite bars. In addition, Eric, Peter, Max and Rollo seem to come from a "homoerotic shadowy milieu". The author consciously used these ambiguities. In an interview in 1988, however, Highsmith said that she did not consider Ripley to be gay: he admired other men physically, but was married and not particularly interested in sex.

The fictional village of Villeperce-sur-Seine is located not far from the city of Fontainebleau , in the vicinity of which Highsmith lived from 1967 to 1981. Tom Ripley's estate is called "Belle Ombre" (Eng. "Beautiful shadow"); this later served as the title of a biography about the author.

reception

“ 'The Boy Who Followed Ripley' combines the Ripley and non-Ripley books in a very subtle and exciting way. It is a work of frightening clarity and great depth, but which never acts as such. Like Graham Greene , Patricia Highsmith knows that she doesn't need to gesticulate. 'The Boy Who Followed Ripley' is the great achievement of an inexhaustible fascination writer. "

- The Times

“Of course the book, the Highsmith handwriting is clearly recognizable, will pass through as a treasure everywhere. […] Nevertheless, I believe that Patricia Highsmith tramples some of the laws of her craft. After all, it owes the popularity it has with, or even first, to the pull of tangible crimes. And it is precisely to them that she hardly pays any more care. "

- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Adaptations

The German translation of the novel was produced as a radio play for ARD in 1991 . In 2009 the radio station BBC Radio 4 broadcast a one-hour radio play version with Ian Hart as Tom Ripley, Nicholas Hoult as Frank and Helen Longworth as Héloise.

expenditure

  • The Boy Who Followed Ripley . Heinemann, London 1980.
  • The boy who followed Ripley . Translated by Anne Uhde, Diogenes, Zurich 1980.
  • The boy who followed Ripley . Translated by Matthias Jendis, Diogenes, Zurich 2006.

All Tom Ripley novels

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patricia Highsmith: The Boy Who Followed Ripley , Diogenes, Zurich 2006.
  2. ↑ Gerald Peary: Patricia Highsmith , Sight and Sound, Spring 1988 (Volume 75, No. 2)
  3. ↑ Andrew Wilson: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith , Bloomsbury, London 2003; German Beautiful shade. The life of Patricia Highsmith , Berlin Verlag, 2003.
  4. ↑ Review by Craig Brown in The Times Literary Supplement, London April 25, 1980
  5. ↑ Review: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18.11.1980, p L6, online pdf, GBV.de . Retrieved May 14, 2016