The Talented Mr. Ripley

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is the third book in the series about the most famous character of the American novelist. A killer "only by necessity," a gourmand and an aesthete, charming and quite good-natured, Ripley is nothing like a banal brute. He inhabits a world where fiction and reality are indistinguishable, the boundaries between good and evil are quite conditional, and crime is a game, a chess match, an innocent pastime between playing the harpsichord and gardening; a kind of puzzle, only the heads at stake are always real. Like the other books in the "Ripliad," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" was successful with readers and has been translated into many languages; based on the novel, Wim Wenders directed the film "The American Friend" in 1977, in which Dennis Hopper played the role of Ripley, and in 2002 a new eponymous film was released with John Malkovich in the lead role.