Search results
Mar 6, 2023 · Muriel Spark’s 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat is a grisly and unsettling masterpiece. In a mere hundred pages, Spark brutally takes apart the crime novel, and brilliantly dissects the changes in gender relations emerging in Europe following World War II to reveal their darker side.
Searches related to the driver's seat reviews problems and answers free
Jan 1, 2001 · Muriel Spark, John Lanchester (Introduction) Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice, and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men.
- (10.5K)
- Paperback
Apr 6, 2010 · The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (1970) New Directions (1994) 107 pp. I decided to start my venture into the Lost Booker shortlist with the shortest of the bunch, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. I could have produced this review as part of my Clock at the Biltmore feature that highlights classic New Yorker fiction fortnightly; The Driver ...
Aug 9, 2021 · The Driver’s Seat presents the idea that oppressive patriarchy can drive people to do crazy things and cause them to self-sabotage. The novella also focuses on that idea that only a woman of ill mind would organise her own murder and therefore Spark’s text also negates any sense of victim-blaming.
- Who Is The Protagonist of The Driver’S Seat?
- The Missing Woman
- The ‘Second Narrative’ Theory
- The First Narrative
- The Hidden Narrative in The Driver’S Seat
- Freeing Lise
- Appearance vs Reality
- Killing Herself
- Everything Upside Down
- What to Read Or Watch Next
What we learn about Lise is confusing and contradictory. In the opening scene, she’s described as a young woman. Later there’s a clinical description, almost as if lifted from the police report, or from someone who barely knows her: She appears inappropriately flirty when talking to the airline clerk, and greedy and ignorant with Bill. She’s irresp...
There are no substantial details about Lise in The Driver’s Seat because this isn’t her tale. One of the story’s many subversions is that, despite the use of the present tense, Lise is already dead. She is ‘missing’ from the narrative and instead, witness accounts recreate the events that follow. There’s testimony from the salesgirl and office coll...
At the novel’s opening, we’re invited to eavesdrop on a shop’s changing room: This memory – its tense, wording and even ingredients – is revised just moments later, almost as if under questioning or examination: Events that happen in the plane are also given twice. First there’s a description of the businessman inexplicably vacating his seat to mov...
On first reading, the story unfolds like this: Lise is going on holiday. It’s important to her to find a remarkable dress – the gaudier, the better. Her colleagues support her vacation (there’s a suggestion of an illness). Lise lives an arid, untouched life: she’s a loner. She’s somewhat unhinged, laughing alone and talking on the phone even after ...
If you read the book as a kind of police report, the plot feels quite different. Here, Lise has been killed and the book is a reconstruction of the events leading to her death. Lise prepares to go on holiday. She lives alone, but has a few supportive friends and colleagues. She finds a dress and coat she thinks look good together. Lise covers up th...
To accept the narrative as the sum of many voices throws doubt on its reliability. Why should we accept their portrayal of Lise, given each has their own agenda? The biggest consequence unbuckles Lise from the driver’s seat altogether. Rather than some Machiavellian femme fatale, Lise is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That the first rea...
As with any detective yarn, The Driver’s Seat sets up the thrills by masking the identity of the killer. Spark does this firstly by throwing Lise in the path of a number of men whom we assume must be bad news because of appearance, cliché, or action. We write-off the killer as a respectable businessman: “a rosy-faced, sturdy young man of about thir...
When Lise finally finagles her man, she dictates how the relationship is to be consummated: If this doesn’t make it plain enough to the police later, the words are placed in Lise’s mouth: Arguably it’s Richard who puts these words in Lise’s mouth. It’s his phoney recollection that shapes the novel, and the reader’s judgement: Lise is killed, and he...
So, everything is upside down in this book. Present tense masks past events. The narration hides who is and isn’t speaking. Ultimately, they play into the biggest swap of all: victim and abuser. The sex-death Lise plans is stand-in for the romance, intimacy and full-blown eroticism that elude her in life. It’s a compromise on the loneliness that fo...
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Rebecca(photofit female characters)Jun 17, 2016 · The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. My rating: 4 of 5 stars. Murlel Spark’s 1970 short novel The Driver’s Seat, recommended to me by a friend and former student, reminds me of a phrase from another short novel, César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, wherein the protagonist’s life is described as “without secrets ...
People also ask
Is the driver's seat a good story?
What tense does the driver's seat use?
What is the main idea of the driver's seat?
What happens in the driver's seat?
Plot Summary. Muriel Spark’s novel The Driver’s Seat (1970) utilizes the present tense, giving the story a sense of urgency even though there is very little action. Lise is shopping for a colorful dress to wear on a trip on which she is about to embark.
