These are three short and early novels by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark. I am rereading the latter two. Memento Mori This novel begins with a phone call to an older Dame at a retirement home. The caller tells the woman “You must remember that you will die” and this mysterious and potentially scary call becomes the the central plot to the novel, and opens up to a darkly funny story as the call repeats over and over again. As the call repeats, and […]
Winter Break
Oroonoko – 2/5 Stars This novel, or maybe not a novel, came out in 1688 and like most early novels there is a strong narrative discomfort in the telling of narrative fictionally. So throughout the novel there’s a lot of extra-text discussions of the truth of the story. Novels have often been mistrusted because of this, but of course, the goal and function of fiction is that sometimes truth isn’t fully explored in nonfiction. And like with theater and poetry, there is a need to […]
Reviews 7 and 8
You Will Know Me The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
If we took a holiday Took some time to celebrate Just one day out of life It would be, it would be so nice
This novel was author Muriel Spark’s favorite of her own works. It is short — a mere 107 pages — but suspenseful, dark and twisted. The NYT called it a “spiny and treacherous masterpiece.” What makes it all the more horrifying is that the reader knows from the beginning what is going to happen. Lise, the young woman going on holiday, is going to be murdered. We know how it happens but we don’t know who does it or exactly how Lise gets herself into […]
The Lives of the Brodie Set
I went on vacation last weekend, and I needed a palate cleanser. If you’ve never read Muriel Spark, she’s just the refreshing sort of writer that I needed to really enjoy. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about an unorthodox teacher of young women in Scotland. She mentors a select group of teen girls, called the Brodie set, and treats them more like equals than children. She tells of her love affair thwarted by her fiance’s death in World War I, secretly pines for […]