Memento Mori [Paperback]

Muriel Spark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2000 | Series: New Directions Classic

Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, "Remember you must die." Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Spark spikes the Geritol of a group of London senior citizens, who begin receiving anonymous phone calls reminding them that death is coming. These seemingly sweet old people, evidently, have some fairly dark pasts. Add in a dash of blackmail and a pinch of adultery, and you have some good, not-so-clean fun.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

She had been a starving writer and editor in the classic style when success bonked her on the head in the late fifties...with Memento Mori, a complex, beautiful, and terrifyingly insightful novel about old age, which Graham Greene claimed 'has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war.' [Her oeuvre] now makes up one of the most trenchant and accomplished bodies of literary work since the Second World War.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1 edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214389
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214384
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #274,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. Spark became a Dame of the British Empire in 1993.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Four Last Things May 26, 2000

By Alex D. Groce

Format:Paperback

Muriel Spark is, as always, deliciously sharp, witty, entertaining, and terrifying. Here a mysterious voice (God? Death? the author?) admonishes a set of alternately charming and despicable souls: "Remember, you must die." Spark is a better novelist than Evelyn Waugh because, while Waugh is often more riotously funny than the ever-subtle Spark, Waugh focuses more on the foibles of the moment--some of his characters will be (though still entertaining) "dated" by the middle of the next century, one suspects. Spark, however, through her tiny intrustions into fictional reality (the voices here, the typewriter in THE COMFORTERS, etc.) enlarges her scope--so long as people die and don't want to think about that fact, MOMENTO MORI will be on target. It is curious that it is the women--Flannery O'Connor and Muriel Spark--who are strong enough to emphasize in the theology of their fiction the "terrible swiftness of mercy," the sheer audacity of the Holy Spirit, as it were. Spark is not only one of the best novelists of our century--she is very likely the most economical. MOMENTO MORI is one of her best. Spark says more in a little over 200 pages than many novelists manage to say in a lifetime of long novels.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Acute, Funny and Humane Look at Old Age and Death June 14, 2000

By mholesh

Format:Paperback

Memento Mori--"Remember you must die"--is the persistent message that intrudes itself into the characters here, a collection of very elderly Englishmen and women of the mid-1950's. Don't be put off by the message, although most of the characters are. This is not a gruesome book. It is a humane, gently hilarious and deadly accurate depiction of what happens to people as they reach and live in old age. The message is a foil for the author's revelation of the individual natures of her characters.

I was amazed that I laughed out loud at several points, so acute are Ms. Spark's observations. If you have known very old people or are one yourself, at least one who has a sense of humor and irony, you can appreciate the universality of these people and their attitudes. The individual characters are bound to their own times and situations, youth in the high Victorian Empire and the years thereafter into the twilight of the post war traumas of diminished England. But I am certain that wherever you are, if you have known old people, and observed them interacting with each other, you will recognize Spark's cast of characters and their adventures. The loves and hates, successes and failures that marked their youth are all carried forward and nursed. People bide their time to avenge, in mundane and petty ways, the petty slights and bullying of their spouses and friends accumulated over a lifetime.

It all comes together memorably in a very readable way.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Psycho thriller with a message September 28, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Muriel Spark is a prolific writer. Her most famous and widely read book is probably "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". But I wanted to savour something different of Spark's and decided on the highly recommmended "Momemto Mori", which is about a bunch of octegenarians being tormented by an anonymous caller. What reads like a typical detective story (Agatha Christie style) turns out to be a psycho thriller with a twist. A dead body does turn up eventually but not before we are nearly three-quarter way through and even then, the murderer's motive and identity are both inconsequential and summarily dismissed. By then, you get the distinct feeling that you have been led up the garden path and that the threatening anonymous caller is a mere (though brilliant) technical devise used by the author to draw to the open the secrets of past indiscretions committed by the book's senior citizen cast. The thought of these oldies fornicating like minxes in their youth is simply hilarious. As it turns out, the caller assumes a different voice for each victim of the hoax. It is this "voice of Death" that triggers off memories of past sins and indeed action on the part of the characters which moves this psycho thriller briskly along. Spark, writing with her usual charm and wit, deftly avoids the danger of the book becoming a "talkie" and for that, we are grateful. I finished the book in two days. It was a delight !