The Driver's Seat (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Obituary", News, BBC, 15 April 2006, archived from the original on 23 April 2006 , retrieved 15 April 2006 .

Whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major - The New York Times Web Archive A Whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major - The New York Times Web Archive

As she travels, Lise meets an array of strange characters. She spends time with Mrs Fiedke, an older lady who is waiting for her nephew to join her. The reader is aware that Lise’s behaviour is most unusual, but Mrs Fiedke is just glad of the company and doesn’t seem to notice, or care. Then there’s Bill, the macrobiotic diet guru who has to orgasm once a day as part of his strict lifestyle. Lise soon decides he is ‘not her type’. And that is the problem she has. She is looking for a man, but most of them turn out to be not her type, and she is very specific in what she wants. The men she meets constantly let her down, presuming that she is looking for sex, or at least sure that they are. Many people miss the darkness in Muriel Spark’s work, but it was never more in evidence than in The Driver’s Seat. Although it is never specified, Lise’s journey appears to be about mental illness and challenges our attitudes towards, and tolerance of, people who have psychological problems and beliefs which are different to what is perceived as ‘the norm’. seat with respect to the other characters. She herself is driven by sexual frustration and secular loneliness to offer herself up as a sacrifice, not to the will of God, but to the infernal demands of the tormenting demons that possessThirty-four-year-old Lise has worked in an accountant's office for 16 years. "She has five girls under her and two men. Over her are two women and five men." In the midst of such symmetries and in spite of the severities and restraints This is the joke at Lise’s expense. She’s not in ‘the driver’s seat’. She delegates the moment of her death (or orgasm – popularised by Freud as “the little death”) to a man. Spark refused permission for the publication of a biography of her by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine holds publication approval rights, and the book was posthumously published in July 2009. On 27 July 2009 Stannard was interviewed on Front Row, the BBC Radio 4 arts programme. According to A. S. Byatt, "she [Jardine] was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer". [20] Honours and acclaim [ edit ] of which she is constituted, Lise is subject to fits of uncontrollable laughter. Everyone at the office agrees that she is in need of a good holiday. "I'm going to have the time of my life," she says.

Analysis of Muriel Spark’s Stories – Literary Theory and Analysis of Muriel Spark’s Stories – Literary Theory and

Comforters," does not know she is a character written into the oneness of fictional reality by God. So in "The Driver's seat" the q-sharp major of religious allegory is only the key, not the whole melody.

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This is why Lise has no last name: there’s no omniscient narrator to give it. The author-narrator who strings together these accounts admits as much: “Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” (p50).

Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat Whose line is it anyway? Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark DBE FRSE FRSL ( née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) [1] was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Millar, Anna; MacLeod, Murdo (14 May 2006), "Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum", The Scotsman, Edinburgh, archived from the original on 30 April 2007 Friedke, a Jehovah's Witness, whom Lise meets and accompanies on a shopping trip, tells Lise about the nephew for whom she buys a pair of slippers and an elaborate, curved knife. This nephew is to arrive from a Northern city that Lise is a young woman (“neither good-looking nor bad-looking”) in her early thirties who leaves her job in an accountant’s office for a holiday in the south. (It is never stated precisely, but Lise seems to be German and her vacation destination appears to be Italy, which was the case in the incident that inspired the book.) self out of the ruins of her public image by becoming a Stella Maris. Poised by the Italian sea, associated with the stars and sea-shells, Madonna-like of aspect, she poses for the reader with her child at her breast,Like the protagonist of Spark’s debut novel The Comforters (1957), The Driver’s Seat implies that Lise may have some awareness of her own fictional nature. Abandoning the book she bought to read on the plane, Lise says: Taylor, Alan (2017). Appointment in Arezzo: a friendship with Muriel Spark. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd. ISBN 9780857903747. OCLC 1005842948. 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). She is right. The nephew is that rosy-faced man who had fled Lise earlier, in the plane. He has just been released after six years' treatment for whatever compulsion had driven him to stab, but not resolutely kill, a woman. "You're a sex

Indecent Exposure: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark Indecent Exposure: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

Maybe its stream of facts is a string of unreliable accounts? What if Lise hadn’t planned to die, but merely to go on holiday?

Behind the driver who drives the Lise who drives the other characters is, of course, Muriel Spark, and the further behind is whatever drives her-a regression that would be infinite did it not come to rest in God. But Lise, unlike Caroline Rose in "The 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. In all of Muriel Spark's ten novels but the last two, there is a Catholic convert, usually a neurasthenic woman, who finds in the "facts" of Catholicism relief from the "lonely grief" Lise suffers, from the fear of death, from Lise is killed, and her killer will ask our sympathy for the two lives destroyed: “She told me precisely what to do. I was hoping to start a new life.”