She had
some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department
store.
When she was
19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.
When she was
20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive.
They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back
to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She
only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to
England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.
Muriel
lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the
artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where
they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their
friends and themselves always denied it.
Muriel died
in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and
nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided
to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel,
who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when
she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human
nature, and so for her writings.
She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The
novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.
Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher
with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school.
There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The
style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.
Other
novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori
and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can
imagine from the title, Robinson
deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where
a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message
“remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people
and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated
in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost
war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman
who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.
Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.
THE EXECUTOR
The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left
all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish
university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and
he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).
There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to
produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for
autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other
people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody
can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t
impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the
writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want
to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our
authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but
with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there,
we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and
very far away from it.
Susan Kyle is appointed
executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his
last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly
everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an
unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it
afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows
about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about
the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story
herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her
persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are
we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m
not going to be a spoiler!
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
Talk about the characters:
The writerThe narratorThe people from universityElaineMrs DonalsonJamieGreta
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
Angus WilsonSaul BellowMary WhitelawJonathan BrownMrs Thatcher
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
VOCABULARY
die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse
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