The Driver's Seat (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Lise’s dress factors largely in this, as a (multi-coloured) red herring. It’s a calling card – a way to be recognised and remembered. here's an aside about novella middles, in the middle of this novella review. Why is it that SHORT books, especially novellas, seem to have pacing issues more often? Is it that we assess novellas partly on their brevity? Is it that many novellas are basically short stories that need padding? Is a pause in a rush more frustrating than a pause around pauses? I don't know, but I felt like I was in the mall in this book for 100 years, and the rest of it flew by. This is a slim book, not much more than a novella really, and no longer than it should be – for although it is obviously brilliant, I couldn't say I exactly enjoyed reading it. It's a nervy, indeed unnerving, kind of experience. The prose does all the things that are currently unfashionable: it's in the present tense, tells without showing, and furthermore favours short, staccato sentences that narrate the action as though we are listening to a particularly banal kind of sports commentary: And the material doesn’t stain,’ the salesgirl says. […] ‘If you spill like a bit of ice-cream or a drop of coffee, like, down the front of this dress, it won’t hold the stain.’ a b Sheridan, Susan (2009). "In the Driver's Seat: Muriel Spark's Editorship of the "Poetry Review" ". Journal of Modern Literature. 32 (2): 133–142. doi: 10.2979/JML.2008.32.2.133. JSTOR 25511808. S2CID 161544914.

Within The Driver’s Seat Lise takes charge and becomes the instigator of her own murder, inverting all traditional stereotypes of a victim being nothing but a passive object. This strong woman being brutally murdered is a common theme throughout many forms of fiction, whether that’s in writing or on screen. Spark takes this trope and inverts it by giving Lise her own sense of control by being the central character in this novella, she will not be forgotten in a heartbeat as with many victims. Spark also uses this story to question the nature of victimhood, however she also gets very close to encouraging the narrative of victim-blaming with the excessive amount of violence against women featured within the novella. The Driver’s Seat investigates the relationship between the aggressor and the victim, it explores the way in which the aggressive cycle continues throughout this relationship. In the oppressive society that Lise lives in creates victims from nowhere, Spark argues that we could all be a victim when faced with this form of society, no matter to what degree. Spark also presents how easily a victim can turn into an aggressor when she truly wants something. You know what I mean, those fleeting instances when a book will just pound you and leave you reeling...the moments that reinvest your passion for reading and the written word. The ending was one of those moments. A completion of a momentous journey that is both utterly successful and an abject failure...leaving nothing but victims in its wake. If you read the book as a kind of police report, the plot feels quite different. Here, Lise has been killed and the book is a reconstruction of the events leading to her death. Meanwhile, closely behind Lise, almost at her side, walks a man who in turn seems anxious to be close to her … He is bespectacled, half-smiling, young, dark, long-nosed and stooping.” (emphasis added) We’re conditioned to finding out more about the protagonist as a play goes on, but this one gives us less. It means that, for all the show’s pizzazz and polish, it leaves us feeling as empty as Lise herself.Lise is going on holiday. It’s important to her to find a remarkable dress – the gaudier, the better. Her colleagues support her vacation (there’s a suggestion of an illness). Lise lives an arid, untouched life: she’s a loner. She’s somewhat unhinged, laughing alone and talking on the phone even after the other person has hung up. This work felt a bit like “anti-Kafka.” By this I mean that, instead of a normal person waking up in a world gone mad and unknowable, Lise begins the story loaded with crazy and proceeds to impose her madness on the society around her. Whereas Kafka’s characters feel out of control and eventually realize the futility of their struggle, Lise feels in complete control and never realizes that she is swept up in forces that are, in the end, beyond her ability to orchestrate. It’s not Kafkaesque, as there’s no external authority, bureaucracy, or control. The frustration and confusion is in her own mind. But there is a sense of menace. So, everything is upside down in this book. Present tense masks past events. The narration hides who is and isn’t speaking. Ultimately, they play into the biggest swap of all: victim and abuser. It was made into a film in 1974 starring Elizabeth Taylor and featuring Andy Warhol. In the U.S the film was renamed Identikit. Spark described it as one of her favourite novels.

Her first novel, The Comforters, was published to great critical acclaim in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel. Okurken takıldığım noktalar, Tanrı anlatıcının sadece Lise’in iç dünyasında sınırlı kalmayıp arada çok da önemi olmayan karakterlerin bakış açısında takılı kalması, spoiler—tecavüz ve araba sahnesinin—iki kere tekrarlanmasının etkiyi kırıp kırmadığı konusundaki şüphelerim, anlatımdaki parça pinçik üslup, kitabı bitirip de üstüne biraz düşününce metin hakkında adeta bir okuma haritası çıktı kendiliğinden. Muriel Spark had enough brains for two normal people but this little novel was almost completely stupid. It was like a terrible joke whose heavily adumbrated punchline is a tiresome and obvious inversion of normal reality, like a banana slipping on the skin of a man. You carry on reading this book, and it is very readable, and doesn't take long, because you can't believe what you are suspecting will be the outcome will really be the outcome, and it is, that's all, no explanation, no nothing. Spark's fans mutter that this is a masterpiece. John Lanchester's introduction says : Some of Dame Muriel Spark's novels focus on unusual crimes and turns of fate, most notably Territorial Rights (1979), about a crime of passion; The Hothouse by the East River (1973); and Not to Disturb (1971), set on the shores of Lake Geneva. Satire was also an important part of her work. The Abbess of Crewe (1974), for example, is a send up of the Nixon-Watergate scandal.

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It opens with Lise having a spat with an assistant in a department store over a garish dress that may or may not be stain resistant. When the narrative arc gradually becomes clear, the “why?” remains unanswered, with the additional uncertainty of who is in control of what, and who is the real victim. I say mostly...but not completely...because the climax of the story went a long way towards rehabilitating all my complaints. I tell you, you're on your own with this one. I cannae help. Don't come here looking for an interpretation, analysis, outline, summary or evaluation. I havenae a clue what she was up to either. It's short, it's well written, it has an ending of sublime genius. It's worth reading...maybe more than worth reading.

As with any detective yarn, The Driver’s Seat sets up the thrills by masking the identity of the killer (see also A Kiss before Dying). A series of short novels followed: The Public Image (1968), a dark story set in the world of Italian publicity, charts the degradation, and the moral recovery, of its central figure, a glamorous movie star. The Driver's Seat (1970) is regarded by some readers, including its author, as her finest single achievement. Written throughout in the present tense, with some reference to the French nouveau roman, it tells of a young woman's frantic search for the man who must murder her. We have come a long way from the relative gentleness of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The many voices that tell this tale (none of them entirely reliable) account for the narrative’s inconsistencies. The construct draws attention to not just who is responsible for Lise’s death, but why the question is important at all. The first narrative

Our Records: Muriel Spark and Scottish births in 1918". www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. ScotlandsPeople. 7 January 2019 . Retrieved 22 March 2022.

I honestly thought I was exaggerating the "Swedish decoration in pastel colours" angle of this book, written such a long time ago. I thought it was satire, until I opened my free weekend newspaper and read an article that made me think Muriel Spark was a master of foreshadowing things she didn't even know existed: The Driver's Seat was, on 26 March 2010, one of six novels to be nominated for “ Lost Man Booker Prize” of 1970, "a contest delayed by 40 years because a reshuffling of the fledgeling competition’s rules that year disqualified nearly a year’s worth of high-quality fiction from consideration." [1] Naw, and three times it is I've read it the noo, can you believe that? THREE TIMES. Well, it's very short. Naw, that's the thing, it doesnae help. In fact it just gets more confusing, cos you keep on finding wee dots that just wullnae join up, d'ya ken? I have this theory that Ms Spark was actually quite often really cruel to her characters, and here she goes that one step further and is cruel to her readers too. She'll be sat up there on her own wee cloud somewhere laughing like a drain at all the cahoots. You know, people trying to make sense of this nonsense? The secret is: THERE ISN'T ANY. Lise seems anxious, stressed, and a bit manic. She’s 34, single, unremarkable to look at, and taking a holiday for her (mental) health, with “ abstract eagerness to be somewhere else”. It’s unclear which country she lives in (she speaks four languages, and when asked where she comes from, she says “nowhere special”), and her destination south is equally unspecific, but feels like an Italian or Spanish city.It’s even a compromise on suicide, because she can’t kill herself. She can’t even die alone – it must be at the hands of another, even in his arms. And so Spark's prose, which began in such simple (even simplistic) constructions, gradually unfurls to reveal a dark ironic sensibility, lit by occasional flashes of beautiful description. Spark’s 1981 novel Loitering with Intent – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize alongside literary giant Doris Lessing and newcomers Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie – is, in common with her other late novels, gentler and warmer than her early fiction. But her eye is as devilish as ever, this time with a focus on the world of books in what is her most autobiographical story. Her heroine Fleur Talbot is writing her first novel and takes a job as secretary to the Autobiographical Association to support herself as she writes. What Fleur suspects about her boss leads to a twisted tale of detection and missing manuscripts, but half the fun is in the insights we get into Spark’s own life: Fleur’s experiences at the Autobiographical Association are based on the Poetry Society and the time in the late 1940s when Spark was, as she put it in her 1992 memoir Curriculum Vitae, ‘employed, or rather embroiled, in that then riotous establishment’.