Description

Dame Muriel Spark provides a wonderfully worrying book, saturated in high-society and reduced cunning.One Oct night five classy London partners gather for a social gathering, experiencing "the pheasant (flambé in cognac because it is)" and waiting for the impending appearance of the delayed-arriving visitor Hilda Damien, who hasbeen unavoidably detained because of the proven fact that she's being killed as of this very moment…Symposium was recommended by Time magazine for the "menacing beauty" of Muriel Spark's "method of sunshine but life-threatening humor." Mixed in really are a Monet, a crazy dad, some unusual nuns, and a theft ring work with a book-a-butler. Symposium celebrities a completely bad small lady (a sweet -experienced hair-raising Sparkian terror) that has committed wealthy Hilda's boy by hook or by crook, connecting him in the berry countertop of Harrod's. There's also religious conversation—and the Bordeaux is outstanding. "The current feeling is urbane: your wine is added, the chat proceeds, and constantly the snow which the protagonists' planet sets has been thinned from beneath, by boiling feelings and unpleasant motives….No dwelling author addresses the strain between custom of phrase and subversiveness of believed more elegantly." (The Independent on Sunday).