Word: mory
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among the offerings which might (with some in accuracy) be termed entirely serious, John C. Holden's Memento Mori is the most substantial. Despite a not entirely satisfactory central metaphor ("My life's a sheet of paber filled with holes./People, punched away by antic death...") and some few rough spots, Memento Mori, which won the Hatch Prize this year, is a fine piece. Mr. Holden succeeds in encasing a particularly unwieldly sentiment in a tight and carefully plotted structure. The skillful shifting of the rhyme scheme, and its complete abandonment at one point, reinforce the progression of Mr. Holden...
British Novelist Spark has been compared to Evelyn Waugh, but the comparison is inexact: she is, in fact, a kind of welfare state Jane Austen, a novelist in whose hands the commonplace becomes mysteriously implausible, the routine eerily irrational. Unlike the scheming septuagenarians of her earlier novel, Memento Mori, the inhabitants of Peckham Rye are so determinedly average that they lack even the capacity to sin grandly. When Mr. Vincent Druce, the managing director of a small textile firm, visits his secretary, Miss Merle Coverdale, to make love to her in the evening, their activity is as carefully calculated...