Word: lise
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Muriel Spark's tenth novel is a portrait of insanity nearly as stark as madness itself. The heroine is Lise, a 34-year-old spinster who has worked in the same office in a North European city for 16 years. Having bought herself an ugly traveling outfit, she sets out for an unnamed southland ostensibly for a vacation, but really to find someone willing to kill...
Like much of Spark's writing, The Driver's Seat has some of the elements of a thriller, but there is no real suspense. In fact, the book is like the paperback Lise carries around with her, which she describes as "a whydunnit in q-sharp major." The reader knows that Lise is crazy from the moment she stalks out of a shop because the salesgirl has told her the preposterous garment she wants is "stain-resistant." The fact that she will be stabbed to death is announced portentously on page...
...Hand. Part of the book's weird fascination lies in the problem of just how she will achieve her goal-after all, even today, murderers do not grow on trees. There is also the relentless Spark humor. In the erratic course of her last day, Lise is befriended by two other freaks who provide the author with a pretext to mock the latest fashions in absurdity. The prize example is a young man named Bill who prattles about Yin and Yang and follows a lunatic regimen that calls for three urinations and one orgasm daily...
...does at her two current studios, one over a hardware store on Third Avenue, the other in the woods near Provincetown, on Cape Cod. The Motherwells go to Provincetown in the summer, to be joined by Motherwell's two daughters by a previous marriage, Jeannie, 16, and Lise, 14. The landscapes done on Cape Cod sing with the oceanic blues, yellow sands, the faded greens of marsh grass, and the savage reds of beach plums...
...familiar. Sāo Paulo has, for instance, several Renoir nudes in his well-known manner. But the eye-opener is the full-length Bather with Griffon, painted in 1870 when Renoir was still seeing through the eyes of his mentor Courbet. It depicts Renoir's first mistress, Lise Tréhot. No later Renoir nude was more lushly sensuous...