Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
Dec. 8th, 2001 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubTo Alec Warner, who organizes his investigations into old age on a bank of index cards, you are "one of us" when you are over 70. All of the major characters here qualify, and many are closer to 90; Miss Taylor is in a residence ward, Godfrey is highly concerned with who is losing their faculties, Charmian's mind wanders after her stroke, Guy Leet has crippling arthritis, Lisa Brooke's funeral is in the third chapter, and most of them receive unaccountable prank calls, "Remember that you must die."
I haven't read many books at all that are devoted to old age. It makes me think I know, in small ways, what it's like to be old.
Incident: one afternoon Charmian is in the house without her husband, who resents her for her reputation as a novelist, and without her new housekeeper, who bullies and babies her; patiently, arduously, she makes her own tea. The tea is her private triumph. The housekeeper drops petty lies to say she is confused, she didn't do it herself.
The use here of omniscient narration reminds me what can't be done with today's more prevalent choices of POV.
I haven't read many books at all that are devoted to old age. It makes me think I know, in small ways, what it's like to be old.
Incident: one afternoon Charmian is in the house without her husband, who resents her for her reputation as a novelist, and without her new housekeeper, who bullies and babies her; patiently, arduously, she makes her own tea. The tea is her private triumph. The housekeeper drops petty lies to say she is confused, she didn't do it herself.
The use here of omniscient narration reminds me what can't be done with today's more prevalent choices of POV.
