Loitering With Intent

Rating:
Summary: One of her best; one of the best books ever
Review: It's hard to believe this book is out of print (as it appears to be in many editions). Spark is the finest living English writer (as of early 2000, she's still with us) and this is one of her best novels. It folds back in on itself. It's obviously autobiographical even with the kind of foreshadowing and self-reflection of the author, who doubles back the flashback, first seeing herself, then seeing herself remember herself.

The plot is fascinating and a constant undertow back into the same themes of the true reality of a book. Is this memoir (fictional) told by an unreliable narrator? I think so. It's hard to know. Some events seem Kafkaesque in their bizarreness, but then turn out to have plain explanations.

Ultimately, evil bizarrely destroys itself; good triumphs with sacrifices. All is never as it appears with Ms. Spark.

Rating:
Summary: A Metaphor for Life
Review: My first introduction to Muriel Spark's work was the movie "The Prime of Ms. Jeane Brody." I was a young budding poet and author growing up in Mississippi, and was influenced by the love poetry of poet Rod McKuen. The lyrics he wrote for the title song for the film moved me. But perhaps what is more important was the way the characters were developed in the book. I began to look for more work by the writer, and came upon "Loitering with Intent."

Aside from Nathalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," no other book has impacted my writing career as much. I recommend Ms. Spark's work to youg and old writers. I use "Loitering with Intent" as text book for character development in writing workshops. There is no other writer, male or female who can do what she does with the development of a character. In addition Ms. Spark's notion that "in life no experience is without value, nothing is lost" preceded the "Celestine Prophecies" by at least two decades.

I call the book a metaphor for life because in the process of inspiring others, it is one of the books I always suggest they read. Muriel Spark is truly one of a kind. Her gift to the writing life in "Loitering with Intent" is priceless. She is to writing, what Quentin Crisp was to style.

Rating:
Summary: A Metaphor for Life
Review: My first introduction to Muriel Spark's work was the movie "The Prime of Ms. Jeane Brody." I was a young budding poet and author growing up in Mississippi, and was influenced by the love poetry of poet Rod McKuen. The lyrics he wrote for the title song for the film moved me. But perhaps what is more important was the way the characters were developed in the book. I began to look for more work by the writer, and came upon "Loitering with Intent."

Aside from Nathalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," no other book has impacted my writing career as much. I recommend Ms. Spark's work to youg and old writers. I use "Loitering with Intent" as text book for character development in writing workshops. There is no other writer, male or female who can do what she does with the development of a character. In addition Ms. Spark's notion that "in life no experience is without value, nothing is lost" preceded the "Celestine Prophecies" by at least two decades.

I call the book a metaphor for life because in the process of inspiring others, it is one of the books I always suggest they read. Muriel Spark is truly one of a kind. Her gift to the writing life in "Loitering with Intent" is priceless. She is to writing, what Quentin Crisp was to style.

Rating:
Summary: A mature and energetic exploration of life's formative years
Review: Spark, as always, completely captures the reader with her straight-on energy and wit. She is a master at this craft, always providing honest and intimate portraits of real, but sometimes quirky, humans. This is nothing new for her. What I find especially intriguing about this novel is the striking perspective it takes--that of a young lady diligently pursuing her destiny despite the hilarious, distracting, and downright mean actions of those more "adult" than she.

This perspective, of honest and thoughtful youth, I find refreshingly sane. The protagonist triumphs completely over the obstacles set before her by employers, publishers, and especially, friends, ultimately realizing her full potential and achieving success. She also defeats passion to some extent, by remaining thoughtful and true to herself, a lesson I find extremely important for young people in modern society, where so little guidance is offered in this area. Though overcoming passion, Fleur is by no means dispassionate, nor is she judgmental or moralizing. She simply recognizes and accepts others for what they are, choosing to spend her time at things most important to her. The clarity of self-perception Spark offers us is, I feel, poetic and inspirational. She manages to convey strength as a force of will and self-worth, rather then the all to frequent hodge-podge of money, appearance, peers, employers, etc., offered by the mass media to young people today.

I hope that this book would be used in cirruculum for teenagers or summer reading programs.

Rating:
Summary: The Story of One's Life
Review: There is a sense of the autobiographical in this novel which in fact is quite appropriate when one considers the actual pivot around which the whole plot revolves. As a note of caution however I must add that I make this statement without having any knowledge at all of Muriel Spark's actual life. As the author spins out the plot she manages to capture the essence of the main character's experience as a secretary for a group of people organized by an individual with the sole aim of writing their biographies so that they may be put away in a safe place for seventy years and their contents not actually revealed until all the people mentioned in these sets of memoirs are actually no longer alive. The idea is that this will be of interest to the historian of the future. Not that the novel itself concentrates unduly on the efforts of this group but rather on the intellectual and emotional reactions of the novel's main character, a young writer whose main concurrent aim in life is to get her first novel published. She is quite a likeable and attractive character and in fact she seems to be the only normal person amongst the rest of the characters portrayed in the novel, even though this impression may in fact be subconsciously and gradually formed in the reader's mind by the first-person point of view of the novel since everything is seen and judged through the eyes of the novel's main character. Even though this is a rather short book it is rather rich with experience and latent meaning well beyond the mere surface of the mostly humorous type of entertainment that pervades it from beginning to end.