The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I think Muriel Spark is one of those writers who needs an entire novel to tell a story. That’s based on most of the really good stories being the longer ones. The shorter stories are more like long jokes, or very artful anecdotes. Still good, though, and there are a few that really shine.
The best story is Come Along, Marjorie, although I doubt very many people will agree with me.
There’s a story that seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of leaving a character, at the end, certain that there was a deep and fatal mystery in one of his most important relationships, and giving him good reason for that certainty; but the narrator knows there was no mystery at all, that it was literally just a case of mistaken identity. And says nothing. The moral of the story is: your torment, in which you can see the whole of your life reflected, in which the entire meaning of your existence hinges on some fact you might be able to glimpse if only you worry at it thoroughly enough, may in reality be totally insignificant. It might mean nothing. The true explanation is totally accidental. Of course, the story itself was arranged with a literary purpose by the author.
Also, I’m pretty sure, without having studied her biography, that Muriel Spark had to leave Africa just prior to World War 2, because there are a lot of stories in which British people have to leave Africa because of the war. And there are a lot of stories about being a novelist, which, to me, have the same pointless, gossipy feel as rap songs about being a rapper. But that’s just a personal peeve, I know every genre of art has a degree of self-reflexiveness without which it probably wouldn’t be able to reproduce.
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