Memento Mori

I was listening to the radio this afternoon while taking one last thorough browse round my favourite but, sadly, soon-to-be-closed bargain bookstore (amazingly I did manage to resist the temptation to buy anything) when I heard on the news that Dame Muriel Spark had passed away. I moaned quietly. Well, I hope it was quiet. I knew she was getting on a bit (she was 88) but it's still sad to hear that one of my favourite living authors is no more.

The bookshop had one of her books in stock - two together in fact: Aiding and Abetting / The Go-Away Bird. I loved Aiding and Abetting - a deliciously witty story (aren't they all though?) about a psychiatrist who suddenly finds herself consulted by two different patients both claiming to be Lord Lucan. It's a pity the miseryguts Booker Prize judges didn't see fit to shortlist it that year (as they had in 1969 and 1981). The Go-Away Bird on the other hand is yet another one of those books-I-haven't-read. I didn't buy it though - the bright red cover design would look garish next to my other Muriel Spark books which are orange Penguin paperbacks. I picked most of them up as a job lot in a sale at West Bridgford library a few years ago, and I've been looking forward - ok: meaning - to read them ever since.

Coincidentally I'd seen one of them in my local library earlier this morning, it was her first novel:

The Comforters

Although her first break had come six years earlier, in 1951, when she won a short story competition in The Observer. I'd pleased to see that The Observer have republished that story: The Seraph and the Zambesi.

In all there are ten of her books sitting on my shelves, most of them still waiting to be read:

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
*The Public Image (1968)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
*Loitering With Intent (1981)

*shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

I will treat myself to one of them tomorrow; and, I suppose in the circumstances, I really must get hold of her 1959 book: Memento Mori...