The Comforters (Virago Modern Classics)

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She finally became better as a result of improved nutrition (she had been chronically malnourished) and a rest cure funded by a number of writers, including Graham Greene. TS Eliot was also moved to write her a letter, reassuring her that there were no such codes in his work. The Comforters contains two broad plot lines: Laurence Manders’ discovery of his grandmother’s involvement in a diamond-smuggling operation, and Caroline Rose’s persecution by an invisible consciousness, a “Typing Ghost” that repeats and remarks upon her thoughts and actions. Much of what happens in The Comforters is connected to the attempts of Laurence and Caroline to solve these mysteries and to prove to each other that their perceptions are grounded in a reality external to themselves. Georgina Hogg is a veritable beast of a woman, mean-spirited and unforgiving, with an ample bosom that threatens all in her path. Worse yet, she "suffers from chronic righteousness." The Comforters, Muriel Spark’s first novel, became a commercial success as soon as it was published in1957, though not to the same level as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Comforters was Muriel Spark’s first novel published when she was nearly forty, she had only begun writing seriously after the Second World War. Spark, had previously suffered from hallucinations, and she brings this experience and her recent conversion to Catholicism to her extraordinary debut. It is a debut that is remarkably assured, in this her first novel, Spark really has set out her stall, showing her readers that they are in the hands of a different kind of writer. While the book was still in proof it was read by Evelyn Waugh, who praised it, the novel’s success meant that Muriel Spark could then afford to write full time.

I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the BBC. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’ urn:lcp:comforters0000spar_h6n6:epub:a3b2c7db-a0f4-4f99-96ce-626a7821a643 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier comforters0000spar_h6n6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t8xb25x8m Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780753185513The central character is Caroline Rose, a novelist recently converted to Catholicism. On returning from a retreat, she starts hearing voices and the sound of a typewriter. The words she hears seem to coincide exactly with her own thoughts. Meanwhile her boyfriend Laurence, who has been staying with his grandmother in Sussex, discovers that the older woman is involved in smuggling, baking diamonds into loaves of bread. Algunos lo son -dije-. El único suelo que comparten está sumergido en el mar. Si las palabras tienen algún sentido y si las islas existen, entonces algunas personas son islas.

This was Spark’s first novel and shows some of the characteristics also to the fore in her later work, in particular a kind of detachment in the writing style that has a tendency to make the characters opaque, but also a high quotient of telling not showing. As a result the characters do not really spark to life. Moreover there are other aspects of the third person narration that actively subvert suspension of the reader’s disbelief in them. Another Muriel Spark novel. I had read already some five books by her. And she is one of my favourite writers. I knew what I expected when I began the novel and I was not disappointed. Only that I was surprised to find out in the curse of reading The Comforters was Spark's debut. When I learned that fact, few things easily fell into places. For instance, the themes of conversion (She became a Catholic in 1954) and writing a novel (a character in the novel, who is also meditating to write a novel, is obsessed with a thought that she is part of a plot written by a disembodied spirit). Spark wants her readers to think rather than feel. A self-conscious work of aesthetic surface-tension, The Comforters involves its readers by revealing the mechanics of our involvement. It treats madness and evil with a disciplined, liberating lightness, in much the same way that Spark, throughout her career, would liberate her readers from the vicissitudes of history and reality simply by redefining, each time, the terms of this "reality". Tiene la costumbre de editar a aquellos escritores que han sido olvidados, que son ignotos pero excelentes, que tal vez escribieron pocos libros pero de gran factura o que son casualmente lo que esta editorial pregona: la originalidad.Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984. No debemos olvidar de mencionar a Miguel, un niño al que Robinson tomó como protegido y que lo ayuda con los quehaceres de la isla. Este personaje también tendrá preponderancia en los futuros acontecimientos que se desatarán en la segunda mitad del libro. Anthologies: Tribute to Wordsworth, 1950 (with Derek Stanford); My Best Mary: The Selected Letters of Mary Shelley, 1953 (with Stanford); The Brontë Letters, 1954 (pb. in U.S. as The Letters of the Brontës: A Selection, 1954); Letters of John Henry Newman, 1957 (with Stanford). Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else's derangement?"

Hay un exceso de reflexiones sobre la religión – en particular la católica – producto al parecer de la reciente conversión de la autora y sus cuitas particulares, pero que aquí me han parecido traídas por los pelos. Most of The Comforters concerns the differing reactions of Laurence and Caroline to these mysteries. The title poem about the selling by his grandchildren of a writer’s literary MSS asks obliquely where the value of art inheres: the writer’s papers ‘are going up /to make their fortune at last, which once were so humble, tattered, and so truly working-class.’ Hague, Angela, and Isabel Bonnyman Stanley. “Muriel Spark.” In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-01-12 07:01:11 Boxid IA40032206 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Just because I had discussed elaborately about Catholic Faith in the novel, do not take it to be a Catholic novel through and through. It is a great entertainer like any other Spark novel. Being a Catholic myself, and interested in the faith journey of Spark, I could not but look for such details when they are so evident. La voz de la narradora, que es January, una de las supervivientes y la única mujer de la isla. La frescura y la mirada cínica y llena de humor que proyecta sobre el entorno y las relaciones que establece con los otros, todo hace que la lectura valga la pena.

The new book is rather on the pattern of Miss Brodie; it is about a group of young ladies living in a genteel hostel near the Albert Memorial, during the months between the end of the war in Europe and the end of the whole thing. As in Brodie, the history of the time is touched in, neatly and with full relevance. The girls are poor though not in want, like the English generally at the time; they are beautiful in poverty, slender (some of them) in means and figure alike. They have a Schiaparelli dress, held virtually in common, and have dealings with an anarchist poet, Nicholas Farringdon, who sleeps with the most beautiful of them, Selina, We know all along about Nicholas’s later martyrdom, but the focus is on the days just before the hostel is destroyed by an old bomb and a fire. Spark does an excellent job describing how the suspense and fear occasioned by the discovery of Robinson's disappearance & the bloody trail to the mouth of the volcano impacted January Marlowe's perceptions of the people around her and their actions. Marlowe in her journal as well as in her thoughts tried to be rational and logical but her personal feelings about the other people involved couldn't help influencing her.Un punto de partida interesante: dos hombres y una mujer van a parar a una isla cuando se estrella el avión en que viajaban. Como el nombre de la isla es Robinson y su único propietario y habitante – junto con el pequeño Miguel – se llama Robinson, enseguida nos llegan ecos de Daniel de Foe, del Próspero de La tempestad y de otros muchos hitos literarios que parten de esta premisa, sin olvidar la versión televisiva de Lost. At the beginning of book 2, however, the focus of the novel shifts from Caroline’s Typing Ghost to Laurence’s grandmother and her entanglement with a diamond-smuggling ring. Book 2 is organized around suspicions: the Baron’s belief that Mervyn Hogarth is a diabolist, Mervyn Hogarth’s fear that Georgina Hogg will denounce him for bigamy, Helena Manders’ conviction that her son Laurence is right about her mother. In due course, the mystery of Louisa Jepp’s gang is solved, and the characters of Mervyn Hogarth, Georgina Hogg, and Louisa herself are fully revealed. Resolving one plot line, however, only resolves half the novel. Caroline on the other hand is is frightened by her mystery. Her friends cannot hear the noises of typewriter keys being tapped and a voice that sounds "like one person speaking in several tones at once". Nor do they manage to record them on tape. Caroline thus fears the worst, that the visitations mean she is going mad. This adds to the isolation she feels because of her religious beliefs and the fact other converts she encounters are either distasteful or a bit dense. Its offbeam style is present from the get-go. From the moment we meet Laurence and his grandmother Louisa, we know there are going to be plenty of eccentrics in the novel.