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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...feels free to focus on the parts of Spark's life that informed her art—and luckily for us, these are plentiful, both because Spark liked to rework her own experiences and acquaintances for her fiction, and because her life tended toward the fantastical in ways that served her writing."
"Wilson is understandably drawn to a period when a formidable writer devoted her energies to biographical projects ..."
"Illuminates a weirder, more wayward writer than I ever grasped as an aspiring member of the Brodie set ..."
"Apologies for the spoiler, but Spark, who always sneaked the ending of a story into its beginning, would probably approve ..."
"Tempting and extraordinary morsels."
"A multifaceted study of the writer through her work ..."
"Electric Spark is a glittering achievement."
"Wilson's investigation into this part of Spark's career provides plenty of drama, both high and petty."
"We may never know, and that's the joy and delight of this book."
"Wilson artfully...flash[es] forward through her biography, so that you often see Spark's future in the instant ..."
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