Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t know whether this is about witchcraft, metanarrative, or an unreliable narrator. I think part of my confusion comes from not knowing how to judge how evil the protagonist is. In her account she’s pretty much totally innocent, and then sometimes some relatively normal person out of the blue tells her she’s evil, in a very genuine way that I want to trust. If the protagonist is lying and she’s evil, the whole plot resolves itself as pretty uninteresting; so I’m apt to lend more weight to the metanarrative strands / references woven in throughout and to the pretty regular gestures toward the occult, and make it something with a little more mystery.
Also, I suspect that her novels are each built around some core joke that I don’t get. I love that so much! They’re hilarious, but not in the way that makes you actually laugh, and then take that to the second power: not only don’t you laugh, you don’t know what the joke was.
Put this on the ‘books to read again, with decoder ring in hand’ list.
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