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CONCULISION
Driver's Seat is a novella by Muriel Spark. Published in 1970, it was once marketed as "a metaphysical shocker". It is in the psychological thriller genre, dealing with themes of alienation, isolation and loss of non secular values.It was made into a film in 1974 starring Elizabeth Taylor and offering Andy Warhol. In the U.S the movie was once renamed Identikit. Spark described it as one of her favored novels. 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 way of forty years due to the fact a reshuffling of the fledgeling competition’s rules that year disqualified nearly a year’s really worth of excellent fiction from consideration."The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is in all likelihood the shortest novel on this list, a chic miracle of wit and brevity, and a Scots basic that’s a masterclass in narrative construction and the art of “less is more”. The action centres on the romantic, fascinating, comedian and in the end tragic schoolmistress Jean Brodie who will, in the most archetypal sense, go through for the sin of hubris, her excessive self-confidence.
At first, her ideas about beauty and goodness, her mysterious glamour and appeal will dazzle and seduce her ladies – “the crème de la crème” – at the Marcia Blaine School, but in the end the equal items will motive her downfall. “Give me a lady at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” Eventually that prediction will be fulfilled in the saddest way imaginable.It is, as Miss Brodie says, “nineteen-thirty-six. The age of chivalry is dead.” The novel’s theme, deftly laid out in a narrative that flashes backwards and forwards, to and from the 1930s, is the schooling of six wonderfully distinctive, heartless and romantic 10-year-old women (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) and the covert study room drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal”, her peremptory dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her incredible enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. That, of course, has nothing to do with school, and the whole lot to do with sex, and the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, with whom Miss Brodie (defiantly in her “prime”) is hopelessly in love. It had been Miss Brodie’s diagram to manage and manipulate the lives of “her girls”. But finally, it is Sandy who, before she turns into Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, exacts the decisive revenge that will doom her trainer to a bitter and solitary spinsterhood. Miss Brodie will never get over it, and die quite soon. “‘Whatever possessed you?’ stated Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke.”
Muriel Spark occupies a unique area in the Observer’s literary history. As a younger woman, she had made her way as a poet, literary editor and literary biographer in postwar London. But it was as a short-story creator that she first got here to prominence at the very end of 1951, when she gained the Observer brief story competition for her surreal and, in places, richly poetic “The Seraph and the Zambesi”. Her novels followed soon after; by means of the late 1950s, she was totally hooked up as a writer to watch.
Spark’s method of composition grew to become quite famous. She composed her fiction in a copperplate hand, generally a single draft with very few corrections, in spiral-bound faculty notebooks from the Edinburgh stationer and bookseller James Thin. It used to be in such a volume that she commenced to write about a middle-aged schoolteacher, drawn from her own school memories.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is so quick that it used to be first published, in its entirety, in the New Yorker, and then reissued in quantity form with the aid of Macmillan in the UK in 1961. The personality of Miss Jean Brodie became Spark’s “milch cow”, and brought her international fame, mainly after the novel used to be made into a movie starring Maggie Smith, who won an Academy (best actress) award for her performance.
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