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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel
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About This Book
The award-winning biographer Frances Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, the most consummate artist of the twentieth century."Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is." —Muriel SparkThe word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is "puzzling." Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences, and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as "Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes." Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.
Reviews
"Wilson does well to focus on the period leading up to The Comforters...because most of Spark's best writing was rooted in her life before 1960."
"A darting, innovative example of the form — perhaps more Ouija board than book ..."
"But Wilson often repeats herself…and aims for clever turns of phrase that end up saying too little ..."
"Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject ..."
"Fitfully illuminating the novels ..."
"Electric Spark is a glittering achievement."
"Wilson has the utmost respect for Spark, but more important for a biographer, she has fervent curiosity about her ..."
"Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark's approach."
"Wilson is not any old biographer."
"A multifaceted study of the writer through her work ..."
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