Very useful, your having been brought up a Catholic,' said Caroline. 'Converts can always rely on your kind for instruction in the non-essentials.' In 1982, a year after Loitering with Intent, Spark’s chilling, yet funny and optimistic retrospect of her years of poverty in London, Going Up to Sotheby’s brought together some new, some unpublished and some previously published poems. ‘Faith and Works’ casts a typically cold eye on the moral and the spiritual life: It may seem that the parable element bulks rather large, that the novel is itself trying to get through the eye of a needle. But Mrs Spark uses all her power “to love and animate the letter”. The commonplace may show the operation of these figures, and others, but it is still represented with an arbitrary novelistic richness; and if “charity” is a word to be reserved for the future of Nicholas, it might still be said that the society of girls is handled with cool tenderness.

Espero que, si todavía no habéis leído a Muriel, os haya convencido con esta reseña ¡No os va a defraudar! There are few writers that come out of the barriers fully fledged with a distinctive style and ideas, as Muriel Spark did. Fortunately, she had literary friends who read the manuscript and championed it, and a new literary star was born. Excluding The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark consistently broke the novel conventions of the day. In this one, she breaks the 4th wall, but instead of the characters talking to the audience, the audience (ie the writer) talks to the characters, well, one in particular. WE don’t find it disconcerting (well, we shouldn’t), but our character Caroline does, just as an audience can feel uncomfortable when we are confronted by an actor on staff deliberately talking to us when we aren’t supposed to be there. Even after winning the Observer short story prize for ‘The Seraph of the Zambesi’, which made the literary establishment notice her and prompted Graham Greene generously to subsidise her writing, Spark did not become ‘only’ a writer of fiction. Everything about Muriel Spark remained heterodox: her fiction subverted the categories critics tried to impose on it – avant-garde, Catholic, magic realist; her Catholicism refused all rules, since she didn’t much like orthodox Catholics, didn’t regularly go to church, didn’t confess and so on; and she continued to consider herself as a poet even when her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made her internationally famous as a novelist and she had reinvented herself as a glamorous, and slim celebrity, living in Manhattan. Y es que M. Spark, con una historia que aúna toques de humor, extravagancia, misterio y personajes carismáticos, consigue una trama diferente y bastante peculiar que mantiene la atención del lector de una manera constante a lo largo de la misma. Una solución temporal! Vosotros los católicos os las sabéis todas. No tenéis más que hacer alguna visitilla que otra al confesionario entre soluciones temporales y todo arreglado."I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the BBC. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’ Caroline is converting to Roman Catholicism, feeling isolated in her belief and finding the other converts she meets either maddeningly sheeplike and unintelligent or, like Mrs Georgina Hogg, whose religious impulse is all material, repulsive. Meanwhile, there are hidden riches, it seems, in the everyday realist bread, and Laurence is piecing clues together to prove a most unlikely story, about his sweet grandmother running "a gang ... maybe Communist spies". But when Laurence asks too many questions of his grandmother's rather banal-seeming gentlemen callers, they worry, rather suspiciously, about him asking "who we are, what we're doing here".

January Marlow becomes the cigarette-pilfering Catholic-convert narrator of a largely humorless novel when the plane on which she is a passenger crash lands on Robinson's island somewhere in the Atlantic. This isn't a story of survival of the fittest, or of battling the elements and instead there's a cat who plays ping-pong.Con el correr del tiempo me fui transformando en un adicto a las novelas que publica La Bestia Equilátera, una editorial distinta, fresca y por sobre todo, original. Sometimes people say to me, 'If only you hadn't undertaken that journey . . . ' 'What a pity you didn't catch an earlier plane . . . ' or 'To think that you nearly went by sea!' Spark considered The Driver’s Seat to be her best-written novel, and it has become a firm cult favourite, its reputation having risen to the point that in 2010 it was shortlisted for The Lost Man Booker of 1970, a retrospective Booker Prize for novels that had narrowly missed eligibility at the time. I am inclined to reject the idea behind these remarks in the same way as I reject the idea that it is best to have never been born. Por el otro lado, nos regala una novela que encierra suspenso y que en cierta manera se desdobla en primer lugar en las complejas relaciones humanas que se dan entre los náufragos, January Marlow (qué casualidad, el apellido de un personaje de Joseph Conrad), Tom Wells (el apellido recuerda a H. G. Wells) y Jimmie Waterford y su anfitrión, el misterioso Robinson, con una personalidad que se puede asociar a otros personajes también misteriosos de las novelas de Verne, como Robur el conquistador o el capitán Nemo, que siempre encierran un secreto inabordable.