Sarah Wrote That | muriel spark

The Time of Miss Jean Brodie

I made this for a presentation on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to my “Time and the Novel” class. Muriel Spark’s casts forward and back in time left such an impression, my first time reading the novel (this was my second), that I was surprised, charting it, to find it’s actually fairly linear. But Spark’s way of starting a section with a character in the future reflecting on her past, then going back to that past (which is our ‘present’) and doing something completely different there means you never feel completely in the time that you’re in; you’re always aware of the future echoing. I find this incredibly rich and enjoyable (some people disagree!), and I think it’s central to the novel’s point.

9 Dec 2010 18:19

Other People’s Writing

Publication and news from UMass folks:

“The Future Of Family Radio,” a new story by Christy Crutchfield, is up at Necessary Fiction
Jensen Beach has two stories in the 2010 Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, “Family” from Necessary Fiction and “We Cannot Cross the River” from Everyday Genius.
Also in the Top 50 are several stories at journals edited by UMass writers:
- From Mike Young’s NOÖ Journal: Matt Bell’s “Brother, There Is a Field” and Karen Gentry’s “Treasure Island”
- From Brian Mihok and Edward Mullany’s Matchbook: Nicholas Brown’s “The New Toothbrush”
- From Hobart (Jensen Beach, co-web editor): Alan Rossi’s “Three Mississippi Fictions”.
Hobart, Matchbook and Gabe Durham also had stories in the Long Shortlist. Congratulations, everybody!

Read on →

A Charming, Appealing Monster

With sentences like this:

She perpetually set Muriel’s teeth on edge but this was not the reason for Muriel spending large sums on dental surgery

Martin Stannard’s new biography of Muriel Spark may not be high on my reading list, but I’m really glad it’s prompted so many reviews and reflections on Spark, like this from the Times’ Charles McGrath:

Reading between the lines of Stannard’s book, one concludes that like a lot of great writers, Spark was actually a bit of a monster — a charming, appealing monster but a monster all the same, willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of her work. She was a neglectful mother; a mercurial and inconstant friend who “went through people like pieces of Kleenex,” according to the writer Ved Mehta, who knew her in the ’60s; a bully to agents, editors and publishers[…] She behaved, in short, like any number of male writers, including ones much less talented than she, but as a woman so ruthlessly and coldheartedly in pursuit of her art she was a little ahead of her time.

(emphasis mine)

25 Apr 2010 23:26