I requested Muriel Spark's Memento Mori from KCLS because I wanted an audio book, and I thought it sounded like a potentially interesting mystery story. The catalog summary reads:
A voice on the telephone warns,
Remember, you must die.The recipient of the grim message is elderly Dame Lettie Colston, but soon ten of Lettie's oldest friends also become targets of Death's anonymous herald. A bizarre investigation lays bare an intricate network of deception and disloyalty that binds together the vulnerable group of aging eccentrics.
That makes it sound much more mysterious than it really is. The telephone calls are certainly bizarre, but the story isn't about the telephone calls. It's about the seventy- or eighty-year-old characters, who they used to be, who they are now, and how they cope with the concept of aging and death.
The ten or so aged people, most of them upperclassmen and -women, in their seventies and eighties, have known each other for half a century and have rivalries that have lasted just as long. Sparks' dry wit and gentle humor evoke the foibles and follies of each character with simplicity and sympathy, so that even the least admirable of them appear likeable. After all, they're too old and tired themselves to care very much about hating each other any more.
Finally, Death claims each one of them. It is an appropriate end to this novel about the method of aging and death.
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