A Sparkling Sentence
This year is Muriel Spark's centenary , and it's been fun to encounter the various tributes to her. I decided to reread The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , her most famous book, because I haven't read it in twenty years or so, though much of it remains vivid in my memory. It was my first Spark, and while I think I appreciated the sharpness of her language at the time, I valued other things in the book. Rereading it now, it is her sentences that amaze me most, because I've learned over the years that one of the greatest pleasures in reading Spark is the pleasure of watching her make complex linguistic acts look easy. Here's an example that I stand in awe of, a single sentence that is a short story unto itself: Even stupid Mary Macgregor amazed herself by understanding Caesar’s Gallic Wars which as yet made no demands on her defective imagination and the words of which were easier to her than English to spell and pronounce, until suddenly one day it appeared...