Muriel Spark in prime form: one of her most enjoyable, complex, and instructive jeux d'esprit. "How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot rejoices. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world," as secretary to the peculiar Autobiographial Association. Mad egomaniacs,...
(more)