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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 is understandably drawn to a period when a formidable writer devoted her energies to biographical projects ..."
"There are moments in Electric Spark when the writing rises to a plausible imitation of Spark's comic bleakness, her elegant deadpan ..."
"Wilson's investigation into this part of Spark's career provides plenty of drama, both high and petty."
"Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark's approach."
"Capacious and penetrating ..."
"Electric Spark is a glittering achievement."
"Apologies for the spoiler, but Spark, who always sneaked the ending of a story into its beginning, would probably approve ..."
"Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject ..."
"Illuminates a weirder, more wayward writer than I ever grasped as an aspiring member of the Brodie set ..."
"A multifaceted study of the writer through her work ..."
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