Like so much of Highsmith’s writing, ‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ is dehydrating, claustrophobic and vertiginous. An idyllic tropical island becomes a hostile, threatening landscape, and a slow-moving, banal snail becomes a relentless predator for one supercilious professor.
“The professor walked on aimlessly in shallow water near the land. He was still going faster than the snail.”
The pace a man is walking as a gun on the mantelpiece.
Highsmith liked snails, took them to parties in her handbag, and also smuggled them into France in her bra, allegedly. Even if true, it’s not really relevant, although it feels like it is, somehow, incredibly relevant.
First published in Eleven, Heinemann, 1970 and, in the US, as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, Doubleday, 1970
A Personal Anthology 