The topics of many of these stories will be familiar to Muriel Spark readers: life for White colonists in South Africa, the struggles of middle and upper-class young people with titles and refined manners but without much in the way of money or prospects, Spark's rather postmodern take on fantasy and the gothic, the lives of those staying in religious institutions and the tensions brought about by living in such close quarters, etc.

It's all told with Spark's caustic wit and an eye that penetrates the grimier motivations and emotions that we hide. I didn't grow to love many of these characters but I became accustomed to Spark's narrative style and presence in the stories. Sometimes I found it hard to sympathise with the problems of the White people living in Africa when they so plainly didn't consider the problems of those living around them, but the way the stories enter into their minds and their lives makes them always interesting, if rarely likeable. The stories hint at some of the usual attitudes you'd find in people writing about Africa in the '40s and '50s, but aside from that issue the stories are never predictable and are always surprising in the way that good short stories are. ( )

http://www.lauragonzalez.co.uk/2013/08/31/the-complete-short-stories-by-muriel-s... ( )

I'm not sure how one goes about reviewing a collection of short stories, especially one as comprehensive as this one, with over 40 stories which have no common theme or motif. What this book demonstrated most clearly to this recently minted Muriel Spark fan was just how creative and imaginative this writer was. Her novels are certainly brimming with unusual characters and circumstances, but in the short story format she also allowed herself to play around with different genres, throwing in plenty of fantastical and paranormal elements. I can't say those were my favourite kind of stories, as I tended to favour those stories which had more in common with the Muriel Spark I adopted after reading Memento Mori and Loitering with Intent, to name just those two. Quite a few of the stories took place in the African continent, and I supposed the author must have lived there at some point. A quick Google search and an article entitled The First Half of Muriel Spark by Roger Kimball yielded the following information:

"Muriel Spark’s sojourn in Africa was the opposite of pleasant: a failed marriage, poverty, little prospect of leaving before the end of the war, few friends with literary interests. (Doris Lessing was living someplace in Rhodesia at the time, but the two writers did not meet until many years later.) Nevertheless, she continued to write, poems mostly, and collected material for some of her best-known stories. Africa, as much as Edinburgh, formed her as a writer. It also made her an adult. It was in Africa, she says, that she “learned to cope with life.” “It was there that I learned to keep in mind … the essentials of our human destiny, our responsibilities, and to put in a peripheral place the personal sorrows, frights and horrors that came my way.”

Horrors there were aplenty. The racial situation was barbaric. The Afrikaner women with whom Muriel mingled were full of smug stories about how uppity blacks had been “fixed.” There was, for example, the farmer who discovered a young black boy standing outside the window of his wife’s room, peeping in at her while she breast-fed her baby. For this violation, the farmer shot the boy dead. The woman who told Spark this story only lamented that the farmer had been sent to prison for three years for killing the boy. “I was unable to speak,” Spark reports. “I simply stared at the woman.”

Muriel Spark obviously used material from real life as creative fodder; the above true account was fictionalized by her in the first story in this collection, The Curtain Blown by the Breeze, one of my favourites because it demonstrates all the strengths which make me appreciate this writer so much: a sense of story with characters that are complex and interesting, an unflinching look at people at their worst, distinguished by a healthy dose of mordant humour.

In all, I'd say I probably fully enjoyed less than a third of the stories, but even those I didn't particularly take to overall had plenty of interesting elements that made them worthwhile. A must for Muriel Spark lovers and those interested in exploring a writer with plenty of range. ( )