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Chargement... Le banquet (1990)par Muriel Spark
Books Read in 2023 (1,732) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Esta es la historia de una cena, un grupo de personas con pasado y conexiones que al principio parecen pocas, pero más adelante se descubre que son muchas... A minor Spark, I suppose, but still delightful. This is a frustrated (in the sense of the murderer’s intent and the reader’s privileged knowledge) murder mystery structured around a dinner party, told through flashbacks with the hosts and eight guests. Dialogue drives the plot but Spark’s writing remains full of surprises, like this description: Her white hair undulated back from her tan-glow forehead, her teeth gleamed, her good bones held up her facial features; she looked like a mild sunset, she had a strong body. Or the contrast between the two last sentences in this paragraph: ’A good brain…’ mused Luke, admiring his own reflection in the deep pool of his mind’s eye. He was far away from Ernst’s moral approbation. He was drinking a beer from a can. Entertaining stuff. Ten sophisticated people sitting round a dinner-table in a posh part of Islington. In the short time that elapses between the hors d'oeuvre and the dessert we need to fit in about a dozen suspicious deaths, some Marxist nuns, a TV documentary everyone half-remembers, art-thieves, crooked manservants, a possible ménage-à-trois, a girl who's married her best friend's dad, a madman from the Kingdom of Fife, an Australian millionairess, the fruit counter at M&S in Oxford Street, and a preraphaelite beauty with a gift for being (at least) in the wrong place at the wrong time. Go on, Muriel, you can do it! This is Spark at her zaniest, as usual with a hard edge somewhere just out of sight, but very much in the mood of The abbess of Crewe. This is a very clever novel, beautifully textured, I loved the way the narrative moves back and forth in time, gradually revealing a little bit more about a group of wealthy, privileged people. It is a novel about what happens when these types of people come together, about the thin veneer of respectability that might exist in such circles. We are though in typical Sparkian territory, and there is also robbery and murder on the agenda and more than a few surprises. “‘Here in Scotland,’ said Magnus. ‘people are more capable of perpetrating good or evil than anywhere else. I don’t know why it is, but so it is. That gives me an advantage.” Hurley Reed; an American painter and his partner Chris Donovan a wealthy Australian widow are hosting a dinner party. Hurley and Chris’s dinners are legendary, invitations much sought after, those who are invited will spend time anticipating the menu. Four other couples are to attend the dinner party, and at the beginning of the novel Spark introduces us to them in a way which could be confusing, but isn’t, Spark never allows her reader to be anything else than interested in finding out more about these people. Lord and Lady Suzy – Lady Helen Suzy is just twenty-two, her husband considerably older, they have only been married about a year. The couple have recently been burgled, while they were asleep upstairs – a fact Lord Suzy is simply outraged about. Ernst and Ella Untzinger, Ernst is a successful man, involved in the world of international finance. His wife Ella has been looking for a job to keep her busy, the couple have been befriended by Luke a PhD student from the states. Luke is currently moonlighting with a domestic service agency – helping out at posh dinner parties and the like. Margaret and William Damien are newlyweds. They have recently returned from honeymoon and taken up residence in the London apartment that William’s wealthy Australian mother (a friend of Chris Donovan’s) has bought for them. Margaret is the main protagonist of this novel, a young woman who met and married William within four months. “The Murchies made their living out of quarrying granite and other stone. They had a well organised small business about which Hilda had found out before she left Australia. Dan Murchie of Murchie & sons, Quarriers and Extractors, Mining Equipment Supplied, was about to retire. But the family business was involved in a sub-contractual way with the Channel Tunnel; and Hilda assumed they needed that sort of money which is necessary to make very much more money. If Margaret had not met William casually in the fruit section of Marks & Spencer’s, she would have suspected, and without rancour, that the Murchies might be after William’s, that was to say, her, money. It was a situation that Hilda could not have it in her to be too sure of, too cynical about. People did fall in love, quite simply.” With her long red hair – Margaret has the strange habit of arranging herself too look like a pre-Raphaelite painting. William’s mother; Hilda who has just arrived in London is expected to arrive at some point during the evening – however she is rather unavoidably detained, as she is being murdered as the dinner party progresses. Annabel Treece and Roland Sykes; a TV producer and genealogist are cousins, and the characters we probably get to know the least well. The cousins are close, and it is only Roland’s homosexuality that prevents them being sexually attracted. Roland’s expertise as a genealogist will play a part in unravelling a mystery about one of their fellow guests. Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan have professional domestic help at their home, their butler Charterhouse is assisted on the evening of the dinner party by the aforementioned Luke. The reader soon realises that there is something about these servants that is rather suspicious. Just how is that Luke is able to sport such an expensive watch, for instance? It is Margaret Damien (nee Murchie) who remains the most interesting character. Gradually we get to know a little more of her backstory – originally from Scotland, she moved to London and met her husband in the fruit and vegetable section of Marks and Spencer marrying him with almost unseemly haste. Margaret does have the misfortune to having been linked to a couple of suspicious deaths before. She has a particularly close relationship with her rather mad uncle – who spends most of his time locked away in a hospital in Scotland though he is allowed out for a family Sunday lunch once a week. In Margaret’s past there is even a community of Marxist nuns, one of them who is surprisingly quite sweary. “So it happened that shortly after Margaret Murchie had joined the community as a novice the BBC duly arrived: Miss Jones, a team of five and their cameras. The first thing they did was to change the lighting arrangements in the recreation room and refectory, clobbering through the hall with their unnecessarily stout boots. Sister Marrow appeared in the hallway. ‘What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing?’ she enquired of the chief cameraman, who was immediately joined protectively by the other four technicians.” You never know what you’re going to get from Muriel Spark, and her nuns in Symposium are a comic delight. There are plenty more surprises before everything falls into place. This is a darkly, sophisticated novel, and I completely loved it.
"Symposium" is not, after all, a modern Platonic dialogue. It is, rather, a murder mystery, but a mild one, in that neither victim nor suspects are emotionally engaging enough to arouse fear. The plot seems a mere excuse for describing the dinner, and the dinner an excuse for delineating modern types. the reader’s first (misleading) impression is of a disorienting randomness of focus. The book begins with an extended dialogue between two characters who all but vanish for the rest of the story, and it ends by dwelling on the grief of another character who has only appeared once before, in a short, digressive scene aboard an aeroplane, and whose connection with the mainstream of the novel’s events is made all the more tenuous when his tailpiece is narrated, uniquely, in the future tense. (Here, as in all her novels, Spark is very careful about tenses.) ... The elaborate structure of Symposium now allows its author to explore, with a convert’s temerity, the very nature of omniscience, be it divine or authorial: of the several Catholic characters in the novel, by far the most important – although there are only one or two misjudged moments of specific intrusion – is the distinctly inscrutable deity who narrates it with such energy and relish. Appartient à la série éditorialeVirago Modern Classics (526)
'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the crème de la crème.' 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 Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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