![]() ![]() ![]() They are all pretty alarming, and the reasons why they are also funny are very complicated. This remarkable virtuoso being in her prime, new books are happily frequent, and the latest, called The Girls of Slender Means, is, like nearly all the others, in some ways the best. Muriel Spark – as Derek Stanford rather quaintly observes in his new book about her – is in her prime like her own Miss Brodie she has a set, and to it should belong anybody who takes an interest in the ways fiction can body forth the shape of things unknown. In this appraisal, Kermode is incisive not only on Spark’s unique style and merit but on the fundamental premises of fiction. Her new novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” “ tone and material” to become “the best written of these superbly written books”. Spark’s first novel “The Comforters” “looks into the question of what kind of truth can be told in a novel” – it is “an inquiry into the way fictions work”. Reading her novels is, he writes, “a work of the imagination” they are shaped by the subjectivity of her characters (and also, therefore, her readers). Spark is known for the lightness and wit with which she wrote about serious themes Kermode also considers how Spark conveys fundamental truths. ![]() In this piece, the literary critic and theorist Frank Kermode considers the work of Muriel Spark in her most prolific era, as a new book about her is released by Derek Stanford. ![]()
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