The Magazine

Dame Muriel Spark, 1918-2006

The novelist of identity.

May 1, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 31 • By KELLY JANE TORRANCE
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MURIEL SPARK died April 13 in Tuscany, her home for the last 30 years. The Scottish novelist lived to the ripe old age of 88. But she had been thinking about death for years. It was the subject of one of her most accomplished novels, Memento Mori (1959). In this wildly funny black comedy, a group of elderly Londoners starts receiving anonymous phone calls with a very odd reproach: "Remember you must die." Each senior's reaction to the baffling calls--are they from some mysterious stranger, or from God Himself?--is different, revealing some fundamental aspect of character.

It was a strange book for a woman of 40, just three years into her career as a novelist, to write. But then just about every book Muriel Spark wrote was peculiar.

The world has lost a singular voice with the death of Dame Muriel. Her short, sharp novels are like those of no one else. Evelyn Waugh publicly praised her books, and Graham Greene's generosity allowed her to begin writing full-time. Her works have something of the biting wit of the former and the intellectual Catholicism of the latter; but in her ability to make the absurd seem everyday, and the darkest deeds deliciously droll, Spark was in a class of her own.

Both the woman and her talent are impossible to label. Was she a Jewish writer? She was born in Edinburgh in 1918, to a Jewish engineer and an English Anglican mother. Much of her work evidences an obsession with the Book of Job--particularly her first novel, The Comforters, which even gets its title from the Old Testament story. But her family wasn't particularly observant, and she converted to the Church of Rome in her thirties.

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