The Driver's Seat (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Dame Muriel Spark had an active literary life as poet and biographer before she turned, in 1951, to fiction.

Muriel Spark - Literature - British Council Dame Muriel Spark - Literature - British Council

Lise is thin. Her height is about five-foot-six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted … she might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six.” a place she had selected long in advance. She tells him how to tie her and how to stab her with that elaborate, curved knife. "First here," she says, "then here and here. Then anywhere you like." He protests. "I of North and South, a system of repeated motifs, images, phrases, a plot made up of abrupt transitions, auspicious juxtapositions, sinister symmetries and significant coincidences. The narrative voice achieves its effects through a frigid

Mount, Ferdinand, "The Go-Away Bird", The Spectator (review of Muriel Spark, the Biography by Martin Stannard), archived from the original on 18 June 2010 . Lise is killed, and her killer will ask our sympathy for the two lives destroyed: “She told me precisely what to do. I was hoping to start a new life.”

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark (BOOK REVIEW) THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark (BOOK REVIEW)

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. On leaving school, she studied précis writing at Heriot Watt College while teaching in a private school, later finding employment as a personal secretary. Poetry: The Fanfarlo, and Other Verse, 1952; Collected Poems I, 1967; Going Up to Sotheby’s, and Other Poems, 1982; All of the Poems of Muriel Spark, 2004.a b Jenny Turner (17 April 2006), "Dame Muriel Spark", The Guardian, archived from the original on 14 May 2008 , retrieved 28 September 2007 . It is best to set such buffers aside and let the work have its way with us, and surely Muriel Spark’s intention in writing her superb book was to make us feel the knife ourselves, hot in our own hands, cold in our own throats, trusting that the appropriate measures of fear and pity would follow. In that she succeeded to a discomforting degree. The Driver’s Seat (which was made into a truly awful movie with Elizabeth Taylor, of all people, as Lise) may or may not give you actual nightmares, but I guarantee that it will literally haunt you; reading it is an experience you will never entirely shake off. You have been warned. Muriel Camberg was born in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell). [2] [3] Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls (1923–35), where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith. [4] In 1934–35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store. Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984.

Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat Whose line is it anyway? Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat

Muriel Spark". National Library of Scotland. Archived from the original on 28 May 2014 . Retrieved 15 March 2014. Childhood - Muriel Spark - National Library of Scotland". digital.nls.uk. Archived from the original on 4 February 2019 . Retrieved 3 February 2019.he is driven into heresy and ersatz religion, like Bill the Macrobiotic and Mrs. Friedke the Jehovah's Witness, or he is driven like Lise and the rosy-faced young man into neurosis and self-destruction. Lise is only in the driver's Spark of Genius" (magazine), Doublethink (a consideration of the author's work), no.Winter, 2006, archived from the original on 9 July 2006 , retrieved 12 July 2006 . Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88", BBC News, 15 April 2006, archived from the original on 23 April 2006 , retrieved 15 April 2006 . Thirty-four-year-old Lise has worked in an accountant's office for 16 years. "She has five girls under her and two men. Over her are two women and five men." In the midst of such symmetries and in spite of the severities and restraints

Spark: The Driver’s Seat | The Modern Novel Spark: The Driver’s Seat | The Modern Novel

Instead the narrative paints Lise as predator. She thrills in the pursuit (“‘The torment of it,’ Lisa says. ‘Not knowing exactly where and when he’s going to turn up.’”). Romance and gender As she travels, Lise meets an array of strange characters. She spends time with Mrs Fiedke, an older lady who is waiting for her nephew to join her. The reader is aware that Lise’s behaviour is most unusual, but Mrs Fiedke is just glad of the company and doesn’t seem to notice, or care. Then there’s Bill, the macrobiotic diet guru who has to orgasm once a day as part of his strict lifestyle. Lise soon decides he is ‘not her type’. And that is the problem she has. She is looking for a man, but most of them turn out to be not her type, and she is very specific in what she wants. The men she meets constantly let her down, presuming that she is looking for sex, or at least sure that they are. The next novel, Not to Disturb (1971), is a brilliant research into the very nature of fiction. The butler in a Gothic mansion seems able to ignore the differences between past, present and future. Since the future is as accessible as the present, he can practise predestination. Like some novelists - perhaps, in some degree, all novelists - he has a passion for connectedness, correspondence, for what 'pertains', what 'symmetrises' - all this expressed in the context of a Gothic tale. The many voices that tell this tale (none of them entirely reliable) account for the narrative’s inconsistencies. The construct draws attention to not just who is responsible for Lise’s death, but why the question is important at all. The first narrative Sleeman, Elizabeth (2002). The International Who's Who of Women 2002. London, England: Europa Publications. p.540. ISBN 978-1857431223.

Ian Bannen’s performance is equally impressive as the obsessive-compulsive Bill, a man who is an unhinged mess of neuroses and who becomes the hyperactive counterbalance to Lise. These are both over the top performances (Taylor’s hair alone is terrifying), and they may be too much for some viewers, but they are what this film demands. There are also some lovely cameos, particularly from Gino Giuseppe and Mona Washbourne, and some distinctly strange ones – step forward Italian idol Guido Manneri, and Andy Warhol as an unnamed English Lord! But they are all just bystanders as the camera follows Lise to the bitter end, and in this it does justice to Spark’s original vision. The message of "The Driver's Seat" is that under conditions the victim sits in the driver's seat. Out of motives secret even to himself, he arranges his own victimization. The reader is never given directly what goes on in Lise's There are no substantial details about Lise in The Driver’s Seat because this isn’t her tale. One of the story’s many subversions is that, despite the use of the present tense, Lise is already dead. Spark and her son Samuel Robin Spark at times had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox Judaism prompted him to petition for his late great-grandmother to be recognized as Jewish. (Spark's maternal grandparents, Adelaide Hyams and Tom Uezzell had married in a church. Tom was Anglican. Adelaide's father was Jewish, but her mother was not; Adelaide referred to herself as a "Jewish Gentile.") Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to advance his career as an artist. [26] Muriel's brother Philip, who himself had become actively Jewish, agreed with her version of the family's history. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh, she told a journalist who asked if she would see her son again: "I think I know how best to avoid him by now." [27] [28] [29] Bibliography [ edit ] Novels [ edit ] self out of the ruins of her public image by becoming a Stella Maris. Poised by the Italian sea, associated with the stars and sea-shells, Madonna-like of aspect, she poses for the reader with her child at her breast,