Muriel Spark was 86 years old when her witty, biting novel The Finishing School was released. The novel crowned an immensely productive writing career. We meet Rowland Mahler, the young founder of a small, dubious private school in Switzerland. His growing jealousy of a clever 17-year old student drives him to madness. Rowland is an aspiring writer and teaches creative…
Tag: Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark’s dark and casually brutal 1970 novel, The Driver’s Seat, throws the reader off balance. The boundary between victim and perpetrator is all but erased. Everyone seems distorted — as though we’re seeing the world through a funhouse mirror. Lise, a 34 year old multilingual office worker at an accounting firm in northern Europe, embarks on a solo vacation…
Muriel Spark’s 1988 novel — a drama, a mystery and a comedy in approximately equal measure — is in some ways a nostalgic, yet unsanitised reflection on the London publishing industry of the fifties. We travel back to postwar London, still pockmarked by the Second World War. Our guide on this journey is Mrs. Hawkins — an ageing insomniac in…
Death is humanity’s common denominator and also the great equalizer. In her 1959 novel Memento Mori, Dame Muriel Spark uses sharp language and imagery to make her many characters face the fear of the one inevitable event in life that they would most desire to avoid. Spark dissects with the keenest scalpel her characters. She pulls away the thin veneer…