Product Description

Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark. In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, "Remember you must die." Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #288085 in Books
• Published on: 2010-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
'There is a Waugh-like brilliance to this novel, in the easy economical narrative, the continuous invention producing a series of surprises, the well-cut dialogue, the controlled tone. This last is the most remarkable of Miss Spark's achievements. Nothing is forced, least of all the humour' V. S. Naipaul, NEW STATESMAN 'I am reading a trio of novels by Muriel Spark, a marvelously witty English writer, one of the few lady writers I like to read. Her best, I think, is Memento Mori, which is chillingly brilliant' Tennessee Williams 'This funny and macabre book has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war' Graham Greene 'A brilliant and singularly gruesome achchievement' Evelyn Waugh 'Memento Mori is one of the great British novels of the last fifty years' Julian Barnes

About the Author
Born in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark was internationally famous and received the Italia Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the FNAC Prix Etranger and the Saltire Prize, among many others. She was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978 and to L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1988. She died in April 2006.

Customer Reviews

Spark reminds us we all must die, but at least have a laugh
Muriel Spark reminds us that we all must die. Read this book and you will not forget this, unlike her septugenarian and octogenarian characters. Because of their selective amnesia a malicious caller interupts their respectful and often laughable lives.

'Remember, you must die,' says the voice, which, understandably, upsets people. Meetings are held and retired detectives reinstated. Old relationships and sordid pasts are gradually and carefully revealed creating a tension with the character's own present and the false identity they cling on to with wrinkled fingers. There is also a more touching tension that of their inevitable and certain future. Those characters who are comfortable with the caller and his message are branded senile, suggesting a feeling of contempt that Spark has for her main characters and their secretive and silly lives.

This is a cleverly constructed novel. It is dark but often light too. There is a delightful sense of irony, and the investigations that attempt to discover the caller's identity give the novel a distinct touch of the Agatha Christie mystery. Muriel Spark is on of Scotland's best writers. This is a very good and funy book.

Hasn't Aged Well
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.

Remember you must die
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.