Customer Reviews

Memento Mori

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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.

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.

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 !

The late Muriel Spark's crisply-written third novel and first genuine masterpiece, Memento Mori (1959), would be followed by nineteen more, including additional bona fide classics The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Driver's Seat (1970), and Loitering With Intent (1981) before her death in April of 2006.

Compared to these and other Spark fictions, however, Memento Mori is remarkable for its essentially straightforward plot (a number of elderly lifelong friends and enemies are harassed by a mysterious telephone caller who states "remember you must die"), its relatively stable mid-Fifties London setting, and the depiction of its cast.

Unlike both earlier and later Spark novels, the characters presented are fairly unambiguous in terms of their natures: they're either essentially humane, decent, and humble, ethically and morally confused, or patently amoral. Thus, in terms of both characterization and the behavior that arises from it, Memento Mori can be interpreted as a highly polished but basic blueprint for all of Spark's future fiction, in which cultured blackmailers, undetected maniacs, manipulative appropriators, and aggressive human parasites abound. In fact, the endlessly conniving, money-obsessed Mabel Pettigrew remains the quintessential Spark villain.

Like the best Spark's novels, Memento Mori also seamlessly knits pronounced metaphysical questions into its text, and addresses the question of human perception and objective control: who or what ultimately manipulates and guides human existence?

As a meditation on human decency, morality, ethics, aging, and mortality, Memento Mori doesn't overtly concern itself with the literal mystery presented by its plot. Like the question of which student betrayed the Scottish school teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the mystery of the phantom caller is disarmed fairly early in the text, and thus subtly revealed as a mere plot device upon which the author effortlessly hangs her weightier themes.

Sophisticated, sharply insightful ("If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs," retired Police Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer advises the assembled cast), and hilariously comic whenever it chooses to be, Memento Mori remains essential Western reading in the new millennium.

Loved this book. It was witty, insightful, and very well-crafted. The subject of old age is treated not only without the usual sappiness and maudlin sentimentality, but with irreverence. Though the book is entertaining, it touches upon a number of important ideas- the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, how modern society regards death, and the treatment of the elderly in today's society. Though the book was written in the mid to late 1950's, it is just as relevant today as it was when originally published.

A wonderful novel about a subject taboo in the 1950's in London... growing old. One of the very few books of its time to talk about those in their 70's and 80's without being patronizing or treating them as stereotypes. BBC Television produced a wonderful version filled with stars who had not held starring roles in decades (except Maggie Smith). Wonderful character studies and a clever premise. Vintage Muriel Spark, for me her finest novel.

Ms. Spark's writing is akin to a master political cartoonist: With deceptively simple strokes, she illuminates the extraordinary, the mundane, and the absurdities of our human condition as we tussle with aging, class, greed, and our mortality.

This mystery novel is one of the most important works of Muriel Spark, a leading Scottish novelist as well as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, who received many prestigious awards such as the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1922 and the British Literature Prize in 1997.

The title, Memento Mori, is a Latin phrase that is commonly translated as "Remember you must die," and this has been widely used as a motif for artistic creations to remind people of their own mortality since classical antiquity. The original thrust of Memento Mori was "Carpe Diem", "seize the day" in Latin, which entails the advice to "Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die!" quoting from Isaiah 22:13. Spark's message, however, seems to differ from the idea of carpe diem in this novel, although the meaning is not literary mentioned anywhere in this book by the author. That means how Memento Mori should be interpreted is all up to the readers, and that is the key to solve the mystery in this novel.

The eccentric yet very interesting idea of this book is the most of the main characters are the elderly people who are septuagenarians and over. They are total of 22 men and women in a variety of living environment---some people are rich and famous, some are ill and dying. In spite of their differences in age, sex, place to live, health and living conditions, they had only one thing in common; all of them received anonymous phone calls in different voice tones whispering a single baffling message, "Memento Mori." Spark depicts tactfully how each character tries to ferret out the culprit.

The beauty of this novel is the fine way Spark describes the lives of the elderly victims. Although she delineates the scene from mental agony of dying woman to excretion in the hospital bed, there is no sadness or melancholy in her description. In Spark's world, everything seems to be able to be subjects of funny story. Mercy may exist somewhere much deeper from the point of view of a Catholic writer.

Another thing I like to point out about the characteristic of this book is that Spark's writings are concise and easy to read. She even reiterates the same phrases and passages several times. As for a reader whose mother tongue is Japanese, since this novel doesn't require much referring to a dictionary, I am satisfied with Spark's novels as foreign reader-friendly books. Some of you may feel that Spark uses the same descriptions too many times. Nevertheless, I'm sure her writings are so pithy and to the point that repetitions are bearable. I'm convinced that you can receive fresh different sounds and meanings of words from the context each time even reading the same passages.

Memento Mori is a mystery novel which has a basic structure of the connection of very modern, ordinary, yet scientific instrument and unrealistic mystique. Spark digs up something we usually forget, or even we never want to remember because of the unpleasant truth. Namely, this is not only a mystery book but also a literature work written in a little lofty style according to the scene. Therefore, if you're just looking for a so-called ordinary, heart-beating thriller, this book is not for you. However, I would like to recommend this book to anyone who likes mystery and wants to look back over your own life seriously and sincerely a little bit for a change.

All the characters in Muriel Spark's novel are old people. There is Dame Lettie Colson who is pestered - but perhaps it is an illusion - by anonymous telephone calls with a voice saying only "Remember you must die", her brother Godfrey and his wife Charmian who live in a sort of ménage à trois. Their life doesn't get easier as they advance in age: senility and physical decrepitude are handicaps they try to live with, sometimes conscious of them but not always.

Then there are the twelve female occupants of the Maud Long Medical Ward, a nursing home, who spend their time gossiping about petty scandals, mostly about wills being rewritten in the favour of another person for some trivial behavioural reason.

The plot is both funny and macabre because all the characters are mean, jealous, curious, witty or confused, probably as they used to be all their life. It seems that old age does not transform our character much, for better or for worse.

This well-regarded meditation on life and death is one of those books I would have been unlikely to ever get around to had it not been selected by my book group. Our group tends to pick (and generally enjoy) classics or works by various well-regarded international writers (recent examples include Saramago, Eco, Calvino, Greene, Pamuk, etc.), so this book seemed like it would fit well within the group's standard range. So it was somewhat surprising to discover that, not only was I not the only one who showed up for our discussion with a rather tepid reaction to the book, but none of the six other well-read members found it in any way remarkable or edifying. Even the person who picked the book (a self-professed fan of Spark's other work) found it a disappointment.

Set in mid-1950s London, the story revolves around an interconnected group of elderly people. In what might be considered a parody of an Agatha Christie book, one, and then another of the old folks start getting mysterious phone calls informing them that "Remember, you must die." However, this is not a detective story or a thriller, except perhaps in the metaphysical sense. Despite recreating the classic scene of gathering all the characters in a drawing room in a debriefing conducted by a retired police detective, Spark is purely concerned with their reaction to the idea of mortality, rather than revealing the true nature of the phone calls. Indeed, two of the calmer characters reflect that the calls may be from "Death" (with a capital D), reflecting Sparks own stated belief that the line between the tangible world and the supernatural is a very thin and blurry one.

However, many of the characters take the statement as a direct threat and grow increasingly agitated, while others take it as a mere statement of fact, and at least one is in total denial, and another finds it an interesting scientific problem. What may be ultimately frustrating, however, is that none of the characters change in any way as a result of the calls -- if anything, their often negative characteristics are only amplified. One pessimistic lesson may well be that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, however it seems more likely that Spark is attempting to highlight the notion that those who contemplate mortality on a daily basis lead more fulfilled lives as a result.

In any event, those who like the book repeatedly cite the venal, immoral, and foolish behavior of the elderly protagonists as a major source of humor. Our group felt that while the various indiscretions, blackmail, and outbursts of jealousy and vitriol may well have been sly and subversive in the '50s, they aren't likely to strike any but the most naive of modern readers as such. Ultimately, I would be inclined to second-guess my reaction to such a critically well-regarded book, except that six other people more or less had the same experience.