Word: fleurs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tiring-house facade. A flat Tudor arch in the center is symmetrically flanked by two doors. Up above is a sizeable gallery that can be curtained, with window openings at both sides. There are a few modest decorations--trefoils and four-leaf flowers, along with a blue-and-gold fleur-de-lys curtain for the French court scenes...
Today, 13 clever and elegant novels later, the question still stands. Loitering With Intent may be as close to an answer as Spark intends to give. Her heroine, Fleur Talbot, is an English writer not unlike herself starting out in a London bed-sitter three decades ago. She takes a job as secretary to a dotty group calling itself the Autobiographical Association, and quickly progresses from helping the members with grammar to embellishing and inventing the very lives they are recounting...
...this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time...
...ends, the autobiographers fade back towards anonymous sanity, Sir Quentin dies, and Fleur's novel attracts enormous acclain. Fleur admits that she lingered to watch the characters wind down, to invite their antagonism, and to risk further danger of libeling them all. "They were morally outside myself, they were objectified. I would write about them one day. In fact, under one form or another, whether I have liked it or not, I have written about them ever since...
FROM THE BOOK JACKET, Spark gazes over her eyeglasses and down her unassuming nose at us. Her keen glance dissects us. She has exposed the emotionally detached Fleur to us. Whether the very talented Fleur Talbot is meant to be the autobiographical persons of the very talented Muriel Spark or not doesn't matter. Strength and weakness, mystery an I magic--these enliven this and all Spark's work and they create a world that cuts itself loose from reality...