Memento Mori
€0,00
First published in 1959, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori begins with a peculiar disturbance in the lives of a circle of elderly friends: each starts receiving anonymous telephone calls bearing the same unsettling message — that they must remember they are going to die. As the calls continue, old rivalries, concealed histories and complicated loyalties emerge, bringing the characters’ pasts into uneasy contact with the present. At the centre of the story are Charmian Colston, a once-celebrated novelist, her husband Godfrey, and the formidable Dame Lettie Colston.
With characteristic precision and dark wit, Spark transforms this curious premise into a comedy of manners and a meditation on mortality, memory, vanity and the passage of time. The novel moves between the absurd and the profound, revealing the evasions and small cruelties that shape human relationships while examining the peculiar freedoms and anxieties of old age. Both mischievous and unsettling, Memento Mori is among Spark’s most distinctive works, demonstrating her gift for making the macabre feel at once comic, intimate and deeply human.
From the book
“Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.”
— Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
On Memento Mori
“A funny and macabre book [that] has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war.”
— Graham Greene