Product Description
Price: [price_with_discount]
(as of [price_update_date] – Details)
[ad_1]
‘The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent – the crème de la crème.’ Ian Rankin
One October evening five London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying ‘the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)’ and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very moment.
With an introduction by Ian Rankin.
Symposium is Muriel Spark – one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and author of classics including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – at her wicked best.
‘A rich, heady, disturbing brew.’ Lorna Sage
‘Extremely clever and highly entertaining.’ Penelope Lively
‘Stiletto-sharp fiction.’ Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday
ASIN : B00C2V4S6M
Editore : Virago; New e. edizione (9 maggio 2013)
Lingua : Inglese
Dimensioni file : 344 KB
Da testo a voce : Abilitato
Screen Reader : Supportato
Miglioramenti tipografici : Abilitato
X-Ray : Non abilitato
Word Wise : Abilitato
Memo : Su Kindle Scribe
Lunghezza stampa : 160 pagine
[ad_2]
Already applauded seller. Great Indy bookstore. This is a first edition find of a NY Times recommended read. Delightful premise (a dinner party) and unique method of conveying who will be attending, an eclectic cast of characters. 192 page easy read. Now need to read her earlier classic, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Such a great premise and I enjoyed much of the dialogue and the characters but the more I read the less I liked this book. The ending completely ruined the whole thing, totally unsatisfying and the trope that itâs the mental patients killing everyone is just lazy and offensive. In what seems like such a clever tale, I found the last third decidedly unclever and really disappointing. And the end just annoying.
Muriel Spark’s prose is full of meaning. This feels like a full length novel although it only spans 147 pages. It centres around a dinner party, a burglary ring and a woman connected with more deaths and murders than anyone innocent has a right to be.The book feels modern in spite of the more traditional (old fashioned use of an) omniscient narrator. There is no one character who dominates the tale. Spark is more than talented enough to make this work.Each chapter feels entirely in the moment, full of immediate description and dialogue, until at the end there is a grim moment of foreshadowing that makes the reader gasp, unable to put the book down and do something else.Funny, sardonic and brilliant. Well worth reading.
Strange story.
This is the fourth book of Muriel Spark that I have read, the others being “Loitering With Intent”, “A Far Cry From Kensington” and “Robinson”. This one, “Symposium”, is also one of the most ambitious, dealing with the themes of religion, class, social mobility. Also about perceptions of mental illness versus eccentricity versus evil: how do you tell if is a person mad, or merely bad, that is, if they are amoral, if they don’t observe the same rules as the rest of us. And what do we as a society do about it: do we lock them up or let them alone? Such a character is Magnus, the mad uncle at the centre of the novel, with his niece Margaret as his female alter ego and accomplice. And the dilemma of what to do about them is the task of their bewildered, beleaguered, colourful Scots family, and is one of the main plot lines of the book.There are also two crime subplots leading to a surprise ending.It’s also a wonderfully funny story. The shock of a burglary, with which the novel begins, is one of the most comical elements of the book, as the aristocratic husband struggles to come to terms with the crime, repeating “It’s like rape!” at dinner parties and in every conversation he has, until his wife is at screaming pitch. Their marriage is documented by her letters complaining about her husband to her stepdaughter, showing the impact of the burglary in their relationship.At this time, one of Spark’s other novels “A Far Cry From Kensington” has been adapted for BBC Radio 4. It’s worth listening to on catch-up, for her sparkling dialogue.But back to this novel “Symposium”.One of the strongest characters is Hilda, a rich businesswoman, whose decisions spark off many of the events of the book: to buy her son and new daughter in law, a flat as a wedding present, and then fatefully decides to buy them an original Monet painting as well. She is one of the reasons that Margaret fortune-hunts marriage to Hilda’s son in order to get at his mother’s money. Margaret is revealed in the course of the book as being strangely connected to a series of murders, which is highlighted by her marriage to a young heir.There are a lot of upper middle class and upper class dinner-and-drinks party scenes and superficial-sounding dialogue, which, like Jane Austen, Spark peels back to reveal serious social questions beneath.In many ways it’s a hard-hitting book: Spark is pretty perceptive about the criminal mind and how it works, despite being best known for comedy/satires. In “Symposium”, it is the crimes that lead the different strands of the story, rather than say, the business of writing a novel, as in “Loitering With Intent”, or the publishing industry, as in “A Far Cry From Kensington”.Add to this story a whole host of characters: an unusual order of nuns, TV crews, media boffins, ambitious graduates serving the moneyed elite as butlers, a couple of arty socialites who provide the party circuit that links many of the characters, rich and poor. Set in London and Scotland, It’s an amazing amount to pack into one short novel.It’s probably best to take your time to savour it and give it a thorough read, although it would be tempting to rush through it because of its relatively small size: it’s not an airport novel. In return, though, the author takes you on a highly entertaining laugh-out-loud, blackly humorous journey.