Symposium (Virago Modern Classics)

by Muriel Spark (Author), Ian Rankin (Introduction), Muriel Spark (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $11.41

  'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme.' Ian Rankin

  One October evening five London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying 'the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)' and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very moment.

  With an introduction by Ian Rankin.

  Symposium is Muriel Spark - one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and author of classics including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - at her wicked best.

  'A rich, heady, disturbing brew.' Lorna Sage

  'Extremely clever and highly entertaining.' Penelope Lively

  'Stiletto-sharp fiction.' Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday

• Used

  Hardcover
  1991

  $3.24

  Dame Muriel Spark delivers a delightfully alarming novel, full of high society and low cunning. One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is) and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very moment... Symposium was applauded by Time magazine for the sinister elegance of Muriel Spark's medium of light but lethal comedy. Mixed in are a Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent-a-butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman (a classic sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror) who has married rich Hilda's son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod's. There is also spiritual conversation-- and the Bordeaux is superb. The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives... .No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly. ( The Independent on Sunday ).