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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780811214384
ISBN number: 0811214389
Label: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 228
Printing Date: 2000-06
Publishing house: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Sale Popularity Level: 104117
Studio: New Directions Publishing Corporation
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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.
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Rated by buyers -
It's a rare novel that mostly peoples its world with the elderly and explores the recognition of the unavoidability of death. Muriel Spark takes a gander via a social comedy that cuts through a few layers of London society circa 1957 (this was published in 1959). Throughout the story, a variety of characters who were born Victorians, were young and full of intrigue as Edwardians, and achieved middle age between the wars, experience various degrees of physical and mental decline. Beginning with the large and bossy Dame Lettie Colston, one by one, they get anonymous calls with a speaker who says the same thing each time: "Remember you must die." Depending on who is receiving the call, the reaction ranges from horror to dismissal, but all stir to life in ways they have not been stirred for some time. Fifty-year-old secrets rise up and cause trouble. One of the characters is a blackmailer. There are wills and fortunes to be made and contested. Meanwhile, an elderly poet is trying to get the experience artistically while a doctor measures their lives scientifically to get at the mystery of age and death. It's hard to keep a lid on.
It is a mare's nest and this review could roll on for paragraphs trying to sort out the carefully woven characters and plotlines, not to mention spoiling them. The irony and wit are rich, and so is the vision of the spiritual realities of death as part of life. Those wanting a traditional mystery plot may be confounded by the outcome to the question of who is molesting everyone with the calls, but then it was not meant to be a straightforward mystery. It can be gritty in places. The image of the working class women for whom retirement means a large, privacy-free ward in a hospital is devastating. When I was visualizing the action, it came through in grey and white imagery--this was London recovering from the war, with glimpses of bomb shelters and ruins here and there. Spark uses very little colour in her descriptions, if at all.
This is an artistic sucess and a pleasure to read. I've nicked it one star only because I liked some of the author's other books better, like A Far Cry From Kensington and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Rated by buyers 
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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 discusion 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.
Rated by buyers 
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The late Muriel Spark's crisply-written third novel and very first genuine masterpiece, Memento Mori (1959), would be followed by nineteen more, including additional bona fide classics The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Driver's Seat (1970), and Loitering With Intent (1981) before her death in April of 2006.
Compared to these and other Spark fictions, however, Memento Mori is remarkable for its essentially straightforward plot (a number of elderly lifelong friends and enemies are harassed by a mysterious telephone caller who states "remember you must die"), its relatively stable mid-Fifties London setting, and the depiction of its cast.
Unlike both earlier and later Spark novels, the characters presented are fairly unambiguous in terms of their natures: they're either essentially humane, decent, and humble, ethically and morally confused, or patently amoral. Thus, in terms of both characterization and the behavior that arises from it, Memento Mori can be interpreted as a highly polished but basic blueprint for all of Spark's future fiction, in which cultured blackmailers, undetected maniacs, manipulative appropriators, and aggressive human parasites abound. In fact, the endlessly conniving, money-obsessed Mabel Pettigrew remains the quintessential Spark villain.
Like the best Spark's novels, Memento Mori also seamlessly knits pronounced metaphysical questions into its text, and addresses the question of human perception and objective control: who or what ultimately manipulates and guides human existence?
As a meditation on human decency, morality, ethics, aging, and mortality, Memento Mori doesn't overtly concern itself with the literal mystery presented by its plot. Like the question of which student betrayed the Scottish school teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the mystery of the phantom caller is disarmed fairly early in the text, and thus subtly revealed as a mere plot device upon which the author effortlessly hangs her weightier themes.
Sophisticated, sharply insightful ("If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs," retired Police Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer advises the assembled cast), and hilariously comic whenever it chooses to be, Memento Mori remains essential Western reading in the new millennium.
Rated by buyers -
This mystery novel is one of the most important works of Muriel Spark, a leading Scottish novelist as well as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, who received many prestigious awards such as the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1922 and the British Literature Prize in 1997.
The title, Memento Mori, is a Latin phrase that is commonly translated as "Remember you must die," and this has been widely used as a motif for artistic creations to remind people of their own mortality since classical antiquity. The original thrust of Memento Mori was "Carpe Diem", "seize the day" in Latin, which entails the advice to "Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die!" quoting from Isaiah 22:13. Spark's message, however, seems to differ from the idea of carpe diem in this novel, although the meaning is not literary mentioned anywhere in this book by the author. That means how Memento Mori should be interpreted is all up to the readers, and that is the key to solve the mystery in this novel.
The eccentric yet very interesting idea of this book is the most of the main characters are the elderly people who are septuagenarians and over. They are total of 22 men and women in a variety of living environment---some people are rich and famous, some are ill and dying. In spite of their differences in age, sex, place to live, health and living conditions, they had only one thing in common; all of them received anonymous phone calls in different voice tones whispering a single baffling message, "Memento Mori." Spark depicts tactfully how each character tries to ferret out the culprit.
The beauty of this novel is the fine way Spark describes the lives of the elderly victims. Although she delineates the scene from mental agony of dying woman to excretion in the hospital bed, there is no sadness or melancholy in her description. In Spark's world, everything seems to be able to be subjects of funny story. Mercy may exist somewhere much deeper from the point of view of a Catholic writer.
Another thing I like to point out about the characteristic of this book is that Spark's writings are concise and easy to read. She even reiterates the same phrases and passages several times. As for a reader whose mother tongue is Japanese, since this novel doesn't require much referring to a dictionary, I am satisfied with Spark's novels as foreign reader-friendly books. Some of you may feel that Spark uses the same descriptions too many times. Nevertheless, I'm sure her writings are so pithy and to the point that repetitions are bearable. I'm convinced that you can receive fresh different sounds and meanings of words from the context each time even reading the same passages.
Memento Mori is a mystery novel which has a basic structure of the connection of very modern, ordinary, yet scientific instrument and unrealistic mystique. Spark digs up something we usually forget, or even we never want to remember because of the unpleasant truth. Namely, this is not only a mystery book but also a literature work written in a little lofty style according to the scene. Therefore, if you're just looking for a so-called ordinary, heart-beating thriller, this book is not for you. However, I would like to recommend this book to anyone who likes mystery and wants to look back over your own life seriously and sincerely a little bit for a change.
Rated by buyers -
A wonderful novel about a subject taboo in the 1950's in London... growing old. One of the very few books of its time to talk about those in their 70's and 80's without being patronizing or treating them as stereotypes. BBC Television produced a wonderful version filled with stars who had not held starring roles in decades (except Maggie Smith). Wonderful character studies and a clever premise. Vintage Muriel Spark, for me her finest novel.
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