Memento Mori

Don’t know how this escaped my notice over the weekend, but Muriel Spark has died. While The Times and just about every other outlet will endlessly prattle on about “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” admittedly her most famous work, that to me was the least of Ms. Spark’s tremendous accomplishments. I don’t remember what introduced her to me, but I spent the ’80s reading and re-reading her short story collections, a wonderful mix of end-of-the-empire British settings, tests of faith, and random acts of violence. She wrote about Catholicism with the cocked eye of a convert who loved it despite its many, many flaws. She wrote about smart, decisive women. She wrote about what England was like after the war for a single girl (the wittily titled “The Girls of Slender Means”). And most importantly to me, she wrote “The Only Problem,” a splendid, odd little rumination about the Book of Job, the only book of the bible I’ve ever been inspired to read and study. “The Only Problem” is a book I’ve read again and again, and now that she has died I know that I shall once again settle into its jumbled French setting and the messes its characters have made of their lives, and what that means in the context of suffering. (“Job,” too, I have read over and over. I find it fascinating inasmuch as it has nothing to do with the rest of the bible, really, coming from a different provenance. It is the only book that tells a single story and tells it well, concisely, and yet its point is the most important point there is — we’re not in a place to understand all this. I highly recommend the Stephen Mitchell translation.)

She also wrote, of course, “Memento Mori.”

For a long time, I judged a bookstore (when there were several more of them) by whether they had Muriel Spark (for though well-known, she wasn’t well-bought). And if they had “The Only Problem,” they would carry a special place in my heart.