#196 The Executor- Muriel Spark
Susan is a forty-ish proud Scottish woman, who has become
the literary executor of her uncle’s will. He was a famous writer. He dies
quietly while fishing alone on his property. “It was a mild heart attack.
Everything my uncle did was mild, so different from everything he wrote.”
While she sorted through his affects, she allowed a
foundation to take his notes, the entirety of his writing study, and his
correspondence. She however, kept for herself his unfinished last novel, ten
chapters of an eleven-chapter work already completed. She wanted to finish the
work herself.
Upon sorting out this manuscript she notices a note from her
uncle, newly written in his hand, prodding her about finishing his novel. For a
month she kept getting notes from beyond the grave which she ignored or burned.
Her uncle was playing with her—or her guilty mind was playing with her. It
turns out that the Foundation that held the rights to his work already had in
their possession the final chapter, but needed the first ten that had ben
withheld.
This is the first time reading Spark. The writing is
eloquent and flowing. I found the Notable Passage below particularly beautiful.
Notable Passage: “He once said that if you could imagine
modern literature as a painting, perhaps by Brueghel the Elder, the people and
the action were in the foreground, full of color, eating, stealing, copulating,
laughing, courting each other, excreting, and stabbing each other, selling
things, climbing trees. Then in the distance, at the far end of a vast plain,
there he would be, a speck on the horizon, always receding and always there and
never to be taken away, essential to the picture—a speck in the distance, which
if you were to blow up the detail would simply be a vague figure, plodding on
the other way.”
No comments:
Post a Comment