Muriel Spark Reading Week: Review Round-up

Thanks so, so, SO much for all your contributions to Muriel Spark Reading Week - it's been such fun, and exceeded the highest hopes that Harriet and I held.   I'm especially thrilled for those people who discovered Dame Muriel for the first time, and loved her.  Harriet has already posted a round-up, but I thought I'd do one here too, for handy reference.  We were SO close to covering all her novels - just The Mandelbaum Gate left out.  [EDIT: Thanks Christine, we've now done them ALL!]  I've not included links to more general posts about Spark (although they were great!) so here are links to reviews of her novels and other books.  Enjoy!

(I don't have Google Reader or anything like that, so it's entirely possible that I've missed your review - do let me know, and I'll add it to the links below!)

The Novels

The Comforters (1957)
Travellin' Penguin

Robinson (1958)
Bibliolathas
A Penguin A Week
Vapour Trail

Memento Mori (1959)
Bibliolathas
CurrerBell
A Girl Walks into a Bookstore
Gudron's Tights
A Penguin A Week

The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Book Trunk
The Only Way Is Reading
Stuck-in-a-Book

The Bachelors (1960)
Behind The Willows
Page Plucker

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
An Adventure in Reading
Book Snob
Excelsior
Harriet Devine
Heaven-Ali

The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Miss Bibliophile
The Book Trunk
Gaskella
Iris on Books
Park Benches & Bookends
A Work in Progress

The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Book Trunk

The Public Image (1968)
Page Plucker

The Driver's Seat (1970)
An Adventure in Reading
Harriet Devine
The Literary Stew
Page Plucker
Somewhere Boy
A Tale of Three Cities

Not to Disturb (1971)
Literature Frenzy!

The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
The Books of Life
Seagreen Reader

The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
Behind the Willows
Our Vicar's Wife
Page Plucker
Stuck-in-a-Book

The Takeover (1976)
My Porch
Stuck-in-a-Book

Territorial Rights (1979)
Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Desperate Reader
A Girl Walks into a Bookstore
Morgana's Cat 

Loitering with Intent (1981)
Behind the Willows
The Captive Reader
Ciao Domenica
Laura's Musings
Our Vicar's Wife
Page Plucker

The Only Problem (1984)
Stuck-in-a-Book
Tales From The Reading Room

A Far Cry From Kensington (1988)
Harriet Devine
His Futile Occupations
A Reader's Footprints
Roses Over A Cottage Door
Semi-Fictional
Silencing the Bell
La Vicomtesse
Winston's Dad

Symposium (1990)
An Adventure in Reading
Our Vicar's Wife

Reality and Dreams (1996)
Fleur Fisher
Our Vicar's Wife

Aiding and Abetting (2000)
A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore

The Finishing School (2004)
Harriet Devine
Iris on Books
Our Vicar's Wife
Silencing the Bell
Somewhere Boy
Tales From The Reading Room


Non-novels and Miscellaneous

Emily Brontё: Her Life and Work (1953)
I Prefer Reading

The Go-Away Bird (1958)
Vapour Trail

Curriculum Vitae (autobiography) (1992)
Somewhere Boy
Stuck-in-a-Book

Complete Short Stories
Desperate Reader

And if you can speak Dutch... several reviews etc. at Leen Huet's blog!

Discussion, discussion...

Harriet will be doing a proper round-up of reviews on her blog tomorrow, and I might well do something after that, so I have a record here too - but I wanted to throw today's post over for discussion in the comments.  This is especially for those of you participating who don't have blogs, but of course everyone is welcome.

1.) How have you found Muriel Spark Reading Week?  What did you read - and was it your first time reading Spark?

2.) Which novel/novels have you been inspired to read next in Spark's canon?

3.) What themes do you identify across Spark's novels?

4.) Which other authors would you recommend to the Spark fan?

I'll answer this one myself, first - I would first and foremost tell people to read Jane Bowles' only novel, Two Serious Ladies, which is very much in Spark territory.  I'd also recommend anything by Barbara Comyns, if you love Spark's detached, surreal-but-matter-of-fact style.  And, perhaps controversially, I'd recommend Ivy Compton-Burnett - because I think Spark learnt a lot about dialogue from reading her.  And Spark does write in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, that she loved ICB before writing her own novels, saying ICB 'resembled the Greek dramatists in her stark themes, and [...] her art was surrealistic.'  Remind you of anyone?

EDIT: Annabel has now suggested a Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week - more here.  Exciting!

5.) Just, well, discuss!  Anything you want to bring up...

Thanks for making this week so fun - maybe we'll come back next year, or maybe the work has been done in getting everyone excited about one of Britain's foremost authors.  Is there an author you think would be great material for a Reading Week?  If there is, don't just tell me - feel free to organise one yourself!

Two More Sparks: The Abbess of Crewe and The Takeover

A couple more Spark novels this morning; later in the day I'll put up a more general post with some questions looking back over Muriel Spark Reading Week for y'all.

I decided to try and cover some of the Spark titles which others haven't read this week, and so in the past couple of days I read The Abbess of Crewe (1974) and The Takeover (1976) - consecutive novels from around the middle of Spark's writing career.  Turns out others have now posted about The Abbess of Crewe (including my own mother), but I'm still alone on The Takeover.  Or The Take-over, sometimes.  But Chris won a copy in my very brief competition on Facebook, so perhaps I won't be alone for so long.  Victoria/Litlove wrote in her excellent post that she's seen a lot of people this week say "this isn't one of Spark's best."  I'm delighted to say I've seen equal amounts of "this is my first Spark novel and I love her!" but, for these two novels, I'm going to have to say... they're not Spark's best.  But Spark's sub-par is still rather wonderful.  Onto the books.

The Abbess of Crewe is, the cover of my rather ugly edition informs me, a satire on the Watergate scandal.  (And, rather wonderfully, apparently a film starring Glenda Jackson called Nasty Habits.)  Now, I don't know a lot about the Watergate scandal, which happened over a decade before I was born, so Our Vicar gave me a quick rundown.  All I knew was that bugging was involved, and that seems to be the most salient detail for understanding the links with The Abbess of Crewe.  Who but Muriel Spark would transfer bugging and intrigue from politics to an abbey?  One which, indeed, uses both the Bible and Machiavelli's The Art of War.

Alexandra is the Abbess of Crewe at the start of the novella - after a chapter, Spark does her frequent trick of taking us back in time, to the period where Alexandra and Felicity both wish to win the 'election' for Abbess - supposedly without canvassing for votes, which is forbidden by abbey rules.  Alexandra is one of Spark's casually ruthless characters, without any strenuous sense of morality (which one might expect from a politician, but is amusingly strange from a nun).  She says wonderfully snarky/Sparky things like this:

"I don't deny," says the Abbess, "that by some chance your idea has been successful.  The throw of the dice is bound to turn sometimes in your favour.  But you are wrong to imagine that any idea of yours is good in itself."

Alexandra is not only determined to become Abbess, she is certain that it will happen.  Of course, the reader knows that it will - but it is curious that Alexandra is herself unswerving in this knowledge.  This sort of prelepsis is common in Spark, and always unsettling.  Another unsettling aspect is - and I can't think of other Muriel Spark novels where she does this - that The Abbess of Crewe is all in the present tense.  Usually that's a big no-no for me, but it works quite well here - because it gives the sense of constant surveillance.  And that's what's going on in the abbey: everyone's movements are recorded and observed, in the buildings and grounds.  And then there is the scandal caused by Felicity, and started by the theft of a thimble, alluded to in the first chapter, but rather a mystery to the reader...

My favourite character was one who was rather irrelevant to the plot - even in the slimmest of novellas (and this one comes in under 100 pages in my edition) Spark finds room for tangents, doesn't she?  Sister Gertrude is off in a far-flung corner of the globe, trying to convert cannibals, somewhere "unpronounceable, and they're changing the name of the town tomorrow to something equally unpronounceable."  She is called by telephone every now and then (somehow), is utterly unflappable, issuing the detached and bizarre aphorisms for which Spark is famous ("Justice may be done but on no account should it be seen to be done.")

The Abbess of Crewe is one of Spark's weirder books, and also one of the more amusing - on Thomas's wonderful Quirktensity Graph he puts it somewhere near the middle, but I'd put it in a very-quirky-not-very-intense position.  For people who know lived through the Watergate shenanigans, I imagine the whole thing would be even more entertaining - for me, it tipped the scales at a little too strange, but it was certainly the sort of novella nobody but Spark could have written.

* * * * *

The Takeover is probably my least favourite of the ten Spark novels I've now read - but it's still rather interesting, and good; everything is relative.  I intended this post to be brief, so I'll whip through The Takeover pretty speedily.  It's set in Italy and apparently (the cover again) it's a 'parable of the Pagan seventies', whatever that means.  Hubert and wealthy Maggie Radcliffe have parted ways; Maggie returns to the area with her new husband but Hubert refuses to leave her house, which is still filled with her furniture.  He busies himself secretly selling off her antique furniture and valuable paintings, replacing them with impressive fakes.  Oh, and Hubert 'considers he is a direct descendant of the goddess Diana of Nemi.  He considers he's mystically and spiritually, if not actually, entitled to the place.'  Here he is, in full Pagan action:

Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, "It's mine!  I am the King of Nemi!  It is my divine right!  I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods..."  And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula - and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not? - at any rate, these words were what Hubert cried.

That's a great example of how Spark writes her narratives: she does not interpret or judge, she simply presents the characters, their words and actions, and sits back to watch them.  In The Takeover, though, the stuff about Diana doesn't really seem too important until the final section.  Before that, it's all about money and lies.

There are plenty of characters - other neighbours, including Maggie's son Michael and his wife Mary; various effeminate ex-secretaries to Hubert; Pauline Thin, his current besotted secretary, etc. etc.  More or less all of them are concerned with embezzling from one another, without any sense of conscience-twinging going on anywhere.  That's one of the reasons I couldn't entirely get on board with this novella.  I'm used to Spark's characters being rather unapologetically ruthless - but here they are in the Evelyn Waugh school of selfishness.

The dynamics between Maggie and Hubert are interesting, as she tries unsuccessfully to takeover her own house, and there are certainly many moments of Spark's inimitable style ("How do you know when you're in love?" she said. / "The traffic in the city improves and the cost of living seems to be very low.") but I'm afraid on the whole I found it rather lacking in momentum.  Perhaps if I hadn't recently read several other Muriel Spark novels, and dozens of reviews, I'd have found the joy of reading her style sufficient - but the comparison has made me feel The Takeover a bit lacklustre.

So, a very brief review, I'm afraid.  I daresay one could write a lot about The Takeover, and if any of you are well-acquainted with 1970s Paganism, it would mean more.  For today's post I seem to have picked the two Muriel Spark novels which require the reader to have lived through the 1970s, don't I?  And interestingly, although both are ostensibly about religious activity, neither really have much to do with religion.  That's one of the few links I can see between these consecutive novels - except for both giving away huge plot twists long before they happen, in typical Spark style.

Of the five Spark books I've reviewed this week, I think her autobiography is my favourite - and, from the novels, I would choose The Only Problem, which keeps growing in my estimation since I finished it.  Later today, as I mentioned, there'll be a general discussion post - especially for non-blogging folk, but of course everyone else is welcome to comment too.  Keep posting your reviews, and letting me or Harriet know!  What fun!

Curriculum Vitae - Muriel Spark's autobiography

Another Spark review from me - three books reviewed in one day, gosh!  Although this one I actually read during Muriel Spark Reading Week, and I'm writing about it down in Somerset - where the book group my Mum runs have all been reading Muriel Spark.  I joined in their lovely lunch, chatting about Spark - everyone enjoyed reading her, although one lady (who had read The Abbess of Crewe, apparently one of Spark's weirder novels) was rather bemused.  I'm hoping Mum will write some reviews of the Spark novels she's read this week... hint hint...!

Once I've read a lot of an author's novels, I like to look into their life a bit.  (You can do the same, very quickly, with Katherine's piece.)  I prefer doing it that way around - so that I have formed my own opinions from the books, and can use biographical information to augment my interest, rather than act as a starting point.  Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark was looming in one corner of my room, but it's enormous, so I went to the horse's mouth - Spark's 'fragments of an autobiography', Curriculum Vitae (1992).

I had been curious to discover quite how Spark would write an autobiography, since her novels so often eschew normal narrative structures and the reliable narrator.  Not that her narrators are particularly unreliable - just the question of reliability seems to be rather sidelined.  Well, in Curriculum Vitae she is very concerned with reliability (I've typed that so often it doesn't feel like a real [reliable] word any more...) and refuses to trust her own memory: 'I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses'.  But there are definitely signs of Spark-the-novelist in the structuring of the autobiography.  Her usual trick of playing around with time makes an appearance, but it's the enticingly disjointed beginning which made me realise Spark-the-autobiographer was no real distance from Spark-the-novelist.  She starts by writing about bread, under its own little subheading.  And then butter.  And so on.  It's an interesting way to structure a childhood, but I don't think any other method would suit this most unconventional of novelists.

Spark grew up in beautiful Edinburgh, amongst family and neighbours who were fairly poorly-off, but with many strict manners and customs - although her own parents seem to have been pretty fun.  I can't summarise Spark's many details about this upbringing, but it demonstrates how incredibly observant she was from an early age - and who knows what she left out, because she couldn't find corroborating evidence?  There are definite signs of the latent novelist in Spark:

I was fascinated from the earliest age I can remember by how people arranged themselves.  I can't remember a time when I was not a people-watcher, a behaviourist.

A while later, whilst completing her education at Heriot Watt College, she notes:

I was particularly interested in precis-writing, and took a course in that.  I loved economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning.

There, I think, you have the two keystones of Spark's novelistic power.  She is endlessly perceptive, and always concise.

In the early section of the autobiography, the part which was of most interest to me (and might well be to others) was on Miss Christina Kay ('that character in search of an author') whose teaching inspired Spark, and helped inspire her most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie.  Of course they are not the same - Spark is too good a writer to lift people straight from life, even if that were possible - but they shared a love of educating girls, of Mussolini, and art.  Spark shows how she used Christina Kay, and where she invented.  Indeed, Spark often finishes an anecdote by mentioning which short story or novel the event helped influence.  The following excerpt is an example of this, but also of the way Spark writes her autobiography with the same unusual, out-of-kilter twists she presents so often in her novels:

Just round the corner in Viewforth lived Nita McEwen, who resembled me very much.  She was already in her first year at James Gillespie's School when I saw her with her parents, walking between them, holding their hands.  I was doing the same thing.  I was not yet at school.  It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, when children used to walk with their parents.  My mother remarked how like me the little girl was; one of her parents must have said the same to her.  I looked round at the child and saw she was looking round at me.  Either her likeness to me or something else made me feel strange.  I didn't yet know she was called Nita.  Later, at school, although Nita was in a higher class and we never played together, our physical resemblance was often remarked upon.  Her hair was slightly redder than mine.  Years later, when I was twenty-one, I was to meet Nita McEwen in a boarding house in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  There, our likeness to each other was greatly remarked on.  One night, Nita was shot dead by her husband, who then shot himself.  I heard two girl's screams followed by a shot, then another shot.  That was the factual origin of my short story 'Bang-Bang You're Dead'.

Perhaps I should elaborate on the self-confessed disastrous marriage which led to her life in (then) Rhodesia; her cunning escape back to Britain during World War Two; her hilarious account of working for the Poetry Society (which helped inspire Loitering With Intent); the various dramatic and often calamitous personal and professional relationships Spark had... but I want you to read Curriculum Vitae yourself, so I shan't.

Spark finishes this autobiography at about the time her first novel, The Comforters, was published.  She talks of a second volume, and it is such a shame that this volume never appeared - I would love to see her take on literary circles and the trappings of fame - but what Spark has written is wonderful enough.  Curriculum Vitae has all the energy and unusual qualities of a Spark novel, with the added joy of acting as a centre from which all her other works are spokes.  Once you've read three or four (or so) Spark novels, I recommend you hunt this down and see her bizarre take on real life - it's further evidence of her claim (I believe) to being one of the 20th century's greatest writers, and certainly one of its most original.

Two Sparks: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Only Problem

Although I'm actually writing this in advance of Muriel Spark Reading Week, I'm confidently going to predict that we're all having a great time, and that you're all putting up brilliant, thought-provoking pieces on this wonderful novelist... yes?  Yes.

Since it's my day to post, I'm going to write fairly speedily about two Spark novels that I've read recently - and hopefully by the end of the week I'll have finished at least one more.  (There will be no shortage of Spark reviews around the blogosphere this week, but if you fancy reading all my archive posts on Spark, including this one, click here.)  I chose The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) because my supervisor said it might be a useful comparison to Lolly Willowes, and The Only Problem (1984) because it looked really interesting, and also one that I hadn't seen mentioned anywhere else in the blogosphere.  Cutting a long story short, I thought they were both brilliant - neither take the crown away from Loitering With Intent as my favourite Spark novel yet, but both add to my cumulative for Spark.  You'll be avidly reading Spark posts here, there, and everywhere, so I'll try to keep my reviews brief... and hopefully enough to intrigue you to read them!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is centred, indeed, in Peckham Rye - and concerns the arrival and influence of one Dougal Douglas (sometimes going by the name of Douglas Dougal.)  The novel opens with the aftermath of a bride being jilted at the altar - indeed, with the bride's mother insulting the jilting groom.  It's all a little confusing (deliberately, one imagines) and it's difficult to get the story straight - especially since everyone is superimposing their views and imaginings over the facts.  The brief chapter concludes:

But, in any case, within a few weeks, everyone forgot the details.  The affair is a legend referred to from time to time in the pubs when conversation takes a matrimonial turn.  Some say the bridegroom came back repentant and married the girl in the end.  Some say, no, he married another girl, while the bride married the best man.  It is wondered if the bride had been carrying on with the best man for some time past.  It is sometimes told that the bride died of grief and the groom shot himself on the Rye.  It is generally agreed that he answered 'No' at his wedding, that he went away alone on his wedding day and turned up again later.

This is a great example of how Spark plays irreverently with the normalities of narrative.  And if the reader expects everything to be neatly unfolded by the end of the novel, then he/she clearly hasn't read much Spark before.  She obeys few authorial 'rules', and weaves her narratives with little concern for the reader's expectation.  If she were writing a play (and she has; I should read them) she would unveil Chekhov's gun in the first act, and nobody would ever lay a finger on it again.

But as someone notes on the first page of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, "It wouldn't have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn't come here."  She is quite right... although it is difficult to trace exactly how Dougal Douglas influences the community, his influence is undeniable.

He turns up somewhat out of the blue, and starts working at 'Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles, a small but growing concern.'  His role is fairly vague.  Mr. Druce, the head of the company, is keen to hire 'an Arts man', and Mr. Druce places Douglas Douglas in charge of 'human research.'

"I shall have to do research," Dougal mused, "into their inner lives.  Research into the real Peckham.  It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus."

This research, it appears, chiefly constitutes attracting the workforce from their duties, calmly meddling in their lives, and undermining their confidences.  Dougal is all things to all people, and yet (although it is never asserted directly) it appears he might be an incarnation of the Devil.  He certainly has growths in his temple which rather resemble sawn-off horns - and the events which ensue from his presence have rather the hallmark of evil.

It is a fascinating concept, and one which has Spark written all over it.  She never gives us the certainty (as Sylvia Townsend Warner does in Lolly Willowes) that we are dealing with the Devil.  There isn't really certainty about much, for either the reader of the residents of Peckham Rye - but events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal's presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark's brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

* * * * *

The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Spark's fourth novel; The Only Problem comes somewhere towards the end of her almost half-century of novelising - but they are unmistakably by the same author.  The concept is quite different, but the manner of approaching it is still very Sparkian.  I say that the concept is different, but thinking about it, these two novels both concern the nature of evil, in some way - though both rather skirt round the issue.

'The Only Problem' of the title is, according to Harvey Gotham, the problem of suffering.  Accordingly, he has taken himself off to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job, and his mind rarely wanders from this topic.  His own suffering seems to take the form of interfering relatives and his ex-wife Effie, whom he abandoned in Italy over a stolen chocolate bar.  The sort of premise which makes me know I'm in the delightfully odd world of Muriel Spark.

Amongst the cast are Effie's sister Ruth, and Ruth's husband (Harvey's old student friend) Edward.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together.  Harvey had never, to Edward's knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten.

That is a very Sparkian relationship.  I can't think of any uncomplicated friendships in the eight Spark novels I've read - there is always some element of uneasiness or sharpness, or simply the failure to communicate naturally which characterises so many exchanges throughout her work.  I love conversations and plot expositions which subvert the normal rules in some way, or ignore the anticipated responses - it's on the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett - and here is an example from The Only Problem.  There are some spoilers in it, so skim past if you want to avoid them:

Anne-Marie had put some soup on the table.  Harvey and Ruth were silent before her, now that she wasn't a maid but a police auxiliary.  When she had left, Ruth said, "I don't know if I'll be able to keep this down.  I'm pregnant."

"How did that happen?" Harvey said.

"The same as it always happens."

"How long have you known?"

"Three weeks."

"Nobody tells me anything," Harvey said.

"You don't want to know anything."

We aren't long in the cerebal world of theological exegesis.  Effie - it is claimed - has become involved in a terrorist organisation, and the police think that Harvey is also somehow implicated.  In vain does he protest (although never especially animatedly - Spark's characters tend towards the calm and detached) that he hasn't spoken to Effie for years.  The rest of The Only Problem follows this mad chain of events - Harvey calmly continuing to offer his readings of Job, while the police interrogate him and his wife's motives and actions remain mysterious.

Spark doesn't, however, permit the obvious parallels.  A lesser novelist (had they been able to think of the juxtaposition) would have used the wider action of the novel as an example of the problem of suffering.  Instead, like in all the novels I've read by her, Spark just lets things happen.  There isn't really any rhyme or reason, or grand overarching narrative point; there are no neat conclusions, just the brilliance of Spark's eccentric but observant writing.

So, two more gems to the Spark canon!  I'm so pleased Muriel Spark Reading Week gave me the encouragement to read more Spark.  Do continue to put links in the comments box, if you've reviewed a Spark novel or written anything about our Muriel - and I hope you're having a fun week!

Muriel Spark: the covers

We'll all be doing lots of reading this week, both on blogs and in books, so I thought I'd offer up a different view of Spark - with a selection of covers.  These are all her novels, in order of publication, although the covers are not all first editions.  I just picked a selection to demonstrate the wide variety of styles which she has been given.  Your thoughts, please!

I love the quirky old Penguin covers - exemplified by the first one below, The Comforters - which seem to get across something of Spark's style.  But I think my favourite might be Memento Mori, which was a Time book club edition... how about you?  Favourite cover from those below?  Which do you think accurately convey the sort of novels Spark writes?  Any favourites which I haven't featured?

Head over to Harriet's tomorrow, for more Muriel Spark Reading Week fun.

Oh, and because I wanted to get it in somewhere this week, Pam sent me the link to this excellent interview with Muriel Spark.  I couldn't get the audio to work, but the transcript is great.

Muriel Spark Reading Week... is here!

Was it really only the beginning of February when I first suggested a reading week for Muriel Spark, and a week later when Harriet had agreed to be co-host, and Thomas had designed us this wonderful badge?

It feels much longer ago.  Well, I was thrilled and delighted when (not including my own comments) those posts got over sixty replies between them.  That's a lot of potential posts this week!  My hope is that we'll manage to read all Muriel Spark's twenty-two novels between us - not to mention her short stories, autobiography, plays, poetry, and biographies.  I've included a list of all her novels at the end of this post.

The Giveaway!

Open Road have kindly offered a free Muriel Spark ebook (review copy via NetGalley) to one lucky person - provided that person has an e-reader, and is in the US or EU (excluding UK).  If that's you, then pop a comment in the comment box, saying you'd like it, and I'll randomly select a winner at the end of the week.  The options are The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or The Hothouse by the East River - I'd argue they're her most and least well-known novels.

The Schedule

Since Harriet and I are co-hosting, we'll be alternating posts this week.  So I'll be posting on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and Harriet will be posting on Wednesday and Friday and Sunday.  As luck would have it, I'll actually be away for a bit this week, and thus some of my posts are pre-scheduled to appear.  So I might be playing catch-up - but will do my best to read every Muriel Spark post that appears!

How did you meet Muriel Spark?

Let's throw this open to discussion in the comments here.  How did you first encounter Muriel Spark?  Perhaps this is your first time reading her, but if not, I'd love to know how you first came to try out one of her novels, and how things progressed from there?

Oddly I'd always believed that I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie first, but consulting my reading diary it turns out that I first read The Girls of Slender Means.  I did, however, read both in 2005.  Neither made much of an impression on me - I probably read them too fast, for a start - and I didn't return to Spark again until five years later.  A few bloggers had raved about The Driver's Seat - and I thought it brilliant.  Suddenly, I was hooked.  I haven't looked back since.

Over to YOU!

Have fun this week!  Do, please, let me or Harriet know when you've written about Muriel Spark this week.  I don't have Google Reader or anything, so although I'll be keeping an eye out, I won't have any way of having a complete list otherwise.

We'll put together links to everything you've been saying, at the end of the week - and fingers crossed we'll be able to put a link to every single one of the books below.  Whether this is your first experience with Spark, or whether you're rather more qualified than me to express your love of Dame Muriel, I hope you have a great time - and can't wait to hear more from you!

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
Memento Mori (1959)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
The Public Image (1968)
The Driver's Seat (1970)
Not to Disturb (1971)
The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
Territorial Rights (1979)
Loitering with Intent (1981)
The Only Problem (1984)
A Far Cry From Kensington (1988)
Symposium (1990)
Reality and Dreams (1996)
Aiding and Abetting (2000)
The Finishing School (2004)

Muriel Spark Reading Week... is coming!

It's really soon, folks!  Indeed, it starts tomorrow.

Both Harriet and I will be putting up introductory posts tomorrow, explaining how the week will work on our blogs - but for you lovely people, all you have to do is read a bit of Muriel this week, blog about it, and let one or other (or both) of us know.  Fun!

See you tomorrow...

Zella Sees Herself - E.M. Delafield

This is one of those posts where I'm going to tell you about a book which is impossible to find... so, should this make you desperate to read it, head to your local academic library!  The book in question is Zella Sees Herself (1917) by E.M. Delafield, her first novel (written when she was my age, actually), kindly lent to me by EMD-enthusiast Marie.  Since it can't be bought for love nor money, I'll keep my post pretty brief...  Oh, and this is the first 1910s book I've read for A Century of Books.

Zella Sees Herself follows Zella de Kervoyou from childhood to early adulthood.  It is what would now be called a coming-of-age novel, yet she comes of age so gradually, and through such shifting stages of maturity, that the term probably doesn't quite fit.  Her first cause for change comes in the first pages, as her mother dies and she is shipped off to live with relatives.  Indeed, she relocates a few times - my favourite of the various relatives she encounters is Aunt Marianne, one of those incredibly un-self-aware women who prefix tired truisms with "As I always say ---" and imagines that everybody has said precisely what she wishes them to say, so she can disregard what they actually think.  (When I say favourite I do, of course, mean favourite to read - not favourite to love.)

We follow Zella through her time at a convent, where she eventually decides to become a nun - and her speedy renunciation of this desire upon leaving the convent.  There is a quick dalliance with society, and finally the need to decide whether or not to accept the first man who proposes to her, unsure of her own feelings.

I've whipped through the plot because it is all fairly standard stuff, both for the period and for Delafield herself.  Apparently it was partly autobiographical.  First novels are always fascinating to read, especially when the first was not the best.  Some authors (Edith Olivier, David Garnett) never live up to their first effort; others go on to much greater feats.  Delafield is in the latter camp, which makes it all the more interesting to spot areas in which she would later develop.  There are plenty of hallmarks of Delafield's later novels - both in theme and style.  Covents crop up a lot in her work, as does the uncertain hunt for a husband.  Aunt Marianne even quotes the title to one of Delafield's later novels:

Aunt Marianne vanished, but reappeared next moment at the door in order to add, in a slightly Scriptural tone which she would not have employed had she been aware that she was quoting no more sacred authority than the poet Shakespeare:

"Remember, Zella, that one is expressly told to go down upon one's knees and thank Heaven fasting for a good man's love."

Ten points if you spotted it, and another ten if you can name the Shakespeare play from which it derives.

More importantly than these sorts of things, there are elements of Delafield's style which are beginning to bud.  You can already see plenty of signs of her dryness, irony, and the pleasure she gets in sending up those who have no self-awareness.  As the title wryly suggests, Zella cannot, in fact, see herself.  It's a theme which is repeated throughout Delafield's work, used both comically and tragically.  In Zella Sees Herself there is both.  Aunt Marianne is one amongst many who is self-deluded.  Another is Alison St. Craye, a few years older than Zella and a would-be intellectual.  In her case, Delafield uses self-delusion for comedy.  Here's an example I noted more or less at random:

The debate proved tedious.

A nervous-looking girl in black was voted into the chair, and made a preliminary speech which began and ended with a stammering sentence to the effect that everyone must agree, whatever their individual view of the matter, that the subject of Reincarnation was a very interesting one.

"Hear! hear!"

Alison's speech was a lengthy one.  Her delivery was slow and over-emphatic; she spoke kindly of Christianity and its doctrines.

Most of the speakers had some personal example, that bore more or less upon the subject, to relate.  One or two adduced strange phenomena experienced by themselves, and a young married woman recounted at some length vivid recollections of ancient Carthage that obsessed her.

Alison shook her head slowly from side to side, with contemptuous disapproval, or nodded it slowly up and down with contemptuous approval.  Lady St. Craye looked interested, and gently clapped each speaker.

Zella thought that she could have made a far more striking and original speech than any of them, but knew herself well enough to be aware that, if she were suddenly called upon to speak, her self-confidence would leave her, and leave her helpless.

For Zella, a lack of self-awareness - and, still more, the pain of dawning self-awareness - is more tragic than comic.  Delafield herself was still young (twenty-six - as I said, my age) and had yet entirely to shake off the earnestness of the youthful author.  Perhaps she never entirely lost it, nor is there any real reason why she should, but I prefer her in poking-fun mode than in exclamatory mode.

For a first novel, this is exceptionally good.  I don't believe E.M. Delafield was capable of writing a bad novel.  In comparison to later efforts, it clearly falls a bit short - but is incredibly interesting in terms of putting another piece in the jigsaw of EMD's writing career, and I'm delighted that Marie gave me the chance to read it.


One other person got Stuck into this Book!

"Some of the characters verge on caricature; there is much more subtlely in Delafield's later characterisation, which relies less on extreme contrast between characters" - Tanya, 20th Century Vox

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

On Tuesday night I went, with my housemate Mel and fellow book-blogger Naomi (aka Bloomsbury Bell - go check out her new Wordpress style!) to hear Jen Campbell talk about Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.  Quite a few of you will know Jen from her blog, and those of you who use Twitter more than I do might well know her as @aeroplanegirl.  One day I'll fully understand Twitter, and then there'll be no stopping me.

Jen had also been a writer in residence at Blackwell's, writing a poem related to each of Blackwell's five floors, and she recited these at the event - I'd love to read them again, so hopefully they'll make an appearance somewhere.

But the main event was the book - having worked in a secondhand bookshop, and the Bodleian, I am familiar with some of the stranger comments and requests made by the Great British Public (calling from New York at 3am to tell the head of Rare Books your spurious theories on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays?  Sure, go ahead!) but I wouldn't have believed she could fill a book, almost entirely from her own experience.  The back section includes other people's contributions, but this is mostly Jen's collection.  It's hilarious.  I'd read all the entries on her blog, but there are plenty more gems.  Here are some from the blog, also in the book, as a taster:

Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er... do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.
Me: .....*headdesk* 

Customer: Hi, I'd like to return this book, please. 

Me: Do you have the receipt?
Customer: Here. 
Me: Erm, you bought this book at Waterstone's. 
Customer: Yes. 
Me:.... we're not Waterstone's. 
Customer: But, you're a bookshop. 
Me: Yes, but we're not Waterstone's. 
Customer: You're all part of the same chain. 
Me: No, sorry, we're an independent bookshop. 
Customer: ....
Me: Put it this way, you wouldn't buy clothes in H&M and take them back to Zara, would you?
Customer: Well, no, because they're different shops. 
Me: Exactly. 
Customer:... I'd like to speak to your manager. 

--

Customer: I read a book in the eighties. I don't remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?

If this appeals, you should definitely get hold of a copy.  And once you've laughed your way through that, I suggest that you check out Bookworm Droppings by Shaun Tyas, from 1988, which is a less attractive title (and rather less well produced) but equally amusing - and essentially the same concept.  Also, I've copied this entry across from my brother's blog - I worked occasionally in a secondhand bookshop during my sixth form, and when I couldn't be there, Colin covered my shifts - and thus was left with this woman... (Hope this is ok, Col... yeah?)

August 31st 2004
Here I am, working at the book shop again... much better than last time, since I've got about three and a half hours left and I've already made £36.25, more than covering my £20 wages. But the last customer I had was rather strange (before you get confused, I'm writing this on my laptop, which I brought into work). I don't want to hurt her feelings, but it's unlikely that she's heard of the internet. [...] Anyways, she came in and asked me if Ian (my boss) was here. I said he wasn't. She said 'What?' and I repeated what I said - this was more or less the pattern whenever I said anything, actually - so she asked me what our phone number was. I didn't know, so I phoned up Dad, and he knew, so I wrote it down on a PostIt. She asked me if the fives were fives, I said (and repeated) that they were. Then she decided she didn't want the phone number on a PostIt, because it was sticky, so I tore part of another PostIt (ie not the sticky part) and wrote it again. This time she said it was too small, but accepted it anyway. After this she left the shop and, I rather hoped, my life, having told me twice that she would like to see Ian's daughter and dog. A few minutes later she came back in and asked me how much the books outside were, so I came outside and told her about four times that they were individually priced, interrupted while she told me the man nearby had just stolen a book. I mumbled something along the lines that he probably already had the book in his hands before coming to the shop, but she probably didn't hear me because she didn't say 'What?' Satisfied that the books did actually cost what they said they cost, she said she'd be back in if she found any books she wanted to buy. Okay. So I went back in, and soon enough she was back, clutching two books and telling me that she'd read one of them (A Tale of Two Cities) in school, but wasn't sure if she'd read the other (Crime and Punishment). I took the books, told her the price (£1.75), and she asked me 'Are you busy?' I wasn't sure what to say - did she mean the shop? Or me? The shop, I assume - so I told her we were quite busy. She made her usual reply, so I told her we were quite busy. Then began the long process of paying - one pound and seventy-five pence - in which she decided to get rid of as many coppers and small coins as possible. When she'd got to about £1.30, the phone rang, so I answered it, but got no reply, and got no number from 1471. Is it just me, or has prank calling never really reached the level of sophistication that it could have done? There are some artists out there, but silence is about as rubbish as it gets. Anyway, she'd got to about £1.35 when I'd said 'hello' several times and hung up... eventually she got to the full one seventy five, and as I was putting the money away in the money-box, she asked me again if I was busy - me personally. Sensing she wanted me to help with something, perhaps along the lines of lifting boxes, I said I had a bit of time. It turned out she wanted me to hold A Tale of Two Cities while she recited from it. She marked the place in the book, read two words, and then asked to see it again. This time, after reading the first line, she was able to recite the last two pages of the book with only minimal errors (which I didn't point out, judging that to do so would bring more trouble than it'd be worth)... well, congratulations to her. She told me that she'd memorised it when she was a girl, and that she was also able to recite pages from Wuthering Heights. It was about this moment that I silently thanked Ian for not putting Wuthering Heights out for sale. Anyways, I told her that it was very impressive (what?) very impressive, and she asked me if I would listen to my grandmother do the same thing... I told her my grandmother was dead, but that I probably would do if she still lived. This was far too confusing for my customer, who simply ignored it, and told me that her grandchildren soon got bored when she tried to recite from nineteenth century classics. Rather than proclaim my astonishment at the foolishness of youth, or point out to her that, as an employee at the shop, I could hardly tell her to shut up, I mumbled something and she shook my hand. Now she's gone, and hasn't come back in the last thirty minutes or so, so I think I'm safe.

Year Five: The Sketches

As has become an annual tradition, I have compiled the sketches which featured during my fifth year of blogging (which, incidentally, almost coincides with the tax year.)  It always reminds me that I haven't done as many as I planned.  But also slightly more than I remember doing.  Here they are - clicking on the sketch should take you to the relevant post!

 

 

Uncanny Stories - May Sinclair

To those of us in this particular corner of the blogosphere, where reprint publishers of early twentieth-century women's novels are our bread and butter, the name May Sinclair is probably most closely connected with her 1922 novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean (and perhaps for coining the term 'stream of consciousness', in print).  And a very good novel it is too (my thoughts here.)  What gets less attention is that the following year she published a collection called Uncanny Stories.  Indeed, she was astonishingly prolific, publishing fourteen books in the 1920s alone - and, as Uncanny Stories demonstrates, was not afraid to venture into different genres.

Truth be told, there is only really one story which stands out in this collection, and that is the first one: 'Where Their Fire is not Quenched'.  I'd read it a while ago, and hoped that the others in the collection would match up - sadly they didn't really.  The atmosphere, characters, and writing were all good, but they often follow essentially the same premise: a ghost returns to clear up some unfinished business, usually romantic. I suppose that is as good a ghost story prototype as any, and Sinclair is careful always to incorporate some psychological angle, but 'Where Their Fire is not Quenched' is excitingly original by comparison.  (Oh, and there is 'The Finding of the Absolute', which is a posthumous discussion about adultery and Kant... but that was mostly bizarre.)

The term 'uncanny' had only recently (four years earlier) been used as the title to an influential essay by Freud ('Das Unheimliche') and it is likely that Sinclair deliberately chose her title to connect with his, especially given her interest in psycho-analysis.  But the relationship between sexuality and the supernatural is not hidden in 'Where Their Fire is not Quenched'.

The story concerns Harriott who, like her near-namesake Harriett Frean, misses out on an early chance at love.  No further opportunities present themselves until, after her father's death, she embarks upon an affair with a married man, Oscar.  They spend a fortnight together in the Hotel Saint Pierre, Paris, and the affair drags on... and on...

She tried hard to believe that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual than Oscar's; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried from pure boreom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her.  Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him.  At close quarters, day in and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.

At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever been really in love with him.

When Harriott wonders whether or not she could marry Oscar, she thinks 'Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape.'  Little does she realise the fate that awaits her after her death... Although she lives many years after the end of her affair, even becoming a deaconess, after her death it is Oscar she sees.

The rest of the story is hauntingly surreal, and incredibly filmic.  It would make a superb short animated feature, actually - think Tim Burton meets Salvador Dali.  Harriott keeps escaping Oscar, running through past memories of a church, her village, her childhood home and garden... but every corner she turns, the rooms and streets rearrange themselves into the corridor of the Parisian hotel.  Sinclair writes this so well, vividly and visually.  I thought that Jean de Bosschere's illustration, which accompanies it, gives a good idea of what Sinclair was trying to convey:

Ineluctably Harriott is forced back to the scene of her loveless affair, overriding everything else she has done.

"In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together.  We shall life here together, for ever and ever, joined so fast that even God can't put us asunder.  We shall be one flesh and one spirit, one sin repeated for ever, and ever; spirit loathing flesh, flesh loathing spirit; you and I loathing each other."

"Why? Why?" she cried.

"Because that's all that's left us.  That's what you made of love."

It is unpopular these days for a work of fiction to have a moral; the much-fated quality of 'openmindedness' has led to people being extremely closed-minded in this area.  It was pretty unpopular for stories to have morals even in the 1920s, but Sinclair has dared to.  The story is not so much a warning against adultery as a cry against sexual relationships where there is no love - as such I think the story is very resonant today, and chilling in ways that Gothicised tales of horror cannot be.  It's a shame that the rest of Uncanny Stories is fairly pedestrian - entertaining and diverting enough, but never experimental.  But I do recommend you track down 'Where Their Fire is not Quenched', in or out of this collection.  In fact, you can read a pdf version here...