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A reader picking up Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, at the time of its publication in 1957, might have noticed that the author was 39 years old, and have thought he was encountering the work of a late developer. It is not an impression that would have survived reading the book’s first couple of paragraphs:
   ‘On the first day of his holiday Lawrence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below. ‘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.’ Lawrence shouted from the window, ‘Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.’’
   Has any novelist ever been as consistently good at openings as Muriel Spark? The reader immediately has a head-full of questions - and part of what remains so fresh about The Comforters is that these questions all turn out to be directly relevant to the entire thrust of the book. Who is this batty old lady? Is she batty? How are we to judge who is mad and who is sane? Why is she so keen to let everyone know about her daughter’s title? Why is she so keen to boast, or to seem respectable? Why is Lawrence so jumpy, and so keen to seem normal? And then the most pressing question of all: to whom belongs this extraordinarily confident, assured, omniscient narrative voice?
   It is part of the book’s genius that this is the question on which the whole structure of The Comforters turns. Because Spark was early identified as a Catholic convert, and energetically praised from the off by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh (who generously wrote that he preferred The Comforters to his own The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold), she in a sense has been generationally misidentified. She is often seen as a figure from the time when, to quote Adrian Mitchell’s “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry”:, writers were “leaving the Communist Church to join the Catholic Party”. She could, though, be as easily seen as a sort of proto postmodernist, a writer with a sharp and lasting interest in the arbitrariness of fictional conventions, whose eager adoption of the conventions of the novel have always been accompanied by a wish to toy with, subvert, parody and undermine them.
   Her attitude to plot exemplifies this approach. Her stories always pose a set of questions. In the course of the novel most of them are resolved - a classic example being the central plot question of Memento Mori, from 1959, arguably her masterpiece: the identity of the voice who rings old people and says to them, “Remember you must die.” But once we have the answer, the larger sense of mystery and strangeness in the book always remains, and we are left with a lingering sense that the question we’ve had answered somehow misses a larger point. Spark supplies our hunger for plot, and at the same time shows us the shortcoming of such things - the extent of the human stuff they ignore, and the troubling persistence of the questions they leave unasked.
   The great flaw in postmodernism, however, has always been that the writer’s freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the reader’s freedom not to care what happens in the book. Spark’s way around this has always been to stress the realness of the real. This is not so say that she is a realist; but realism is one of the things she can do. This is the opening of The Girls of Slender Means, from 1963:
   “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new artform, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.”
   There is no denying that this is the real London of 1945 - the sense of the depressed, half-ruined city is almost physically palpable. Her London is as much the real London as her Edinburgh in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the real Edinburgh (complete with the “amazingly terrible” smell in the 1930s high street). But there are also notes hinting that this all-too-real scene is a mental stage as much as it is a physical one. All metaphors have, to some extent, an anti-realistic effect: here, the comparison with a giant mouth, while striking, begins to suggest that, behind the real ruined London, there is a prompting imagination at work; then we are being told about castles, which make us think of fairy tales, and then of stage-sets, which make us think of theatre, and then we are finally led towards an encounter with the fount of all imagination, “the mind’s eye”. It is as if Spark wants to parallel the emphasis on reality with a reminder that this is all a fiction, a writer’s story being recreated in the mind of a reader in the act of reading.
   Why does she bother to do this? After all, we know the fiction is a fiction; we aren’t stupid. (Or rather, we may well be stupid, but we do at least know that.) The need to gesture at the fictionality of her fictions is, I would suggest, rooted in Spark’s Catholicism, and particularly in her wish not to compete with God. The particular author is always subordinate to the final Author; our fictions must not ever seem to compete with His. She does not arrogate to herself the same rights as the atheist Flaubert, who thought the novelist should be like God, “everywhere present, nowhere visible”, or the atheist Joyce, who thought that the novelist should again be like God, “indifferent, paring his fingernails”. This is not Spark’s way: in her view, the novelist has a duty to make it clear that her version of reality is just a version, a fiction.
   This is not just a meta-fictional issue for Spark, but something that is woven into the tissue of all her books. Her 22-novel oeuvre has a wide range of geography and subject: from 30s Edinburgh (Jean Brodie) to 90s Paris (Aiding and Abetting), from demonological fantasists in south London (The Ballad of Peckham Rye) to a parody of Watergate and President Nixon’s impeachment (The Abbess of Crewe). Her books usually take place in a closed world, a school or convent or a hostel. But Spark’s novels always have a central figure who is in the grip of a delusion, and is in some way trying to play God, whether it be Brodie with her schoolgirls or the Abbess with her nuns. Not that the central character is usually the only person to be deluded: many, or even most of the ancillary characters are always in the grip of some degree of fantasy or misapprehension. Any one of her books could take as its epigraph TS Eliot’s line, “humankind cannot bear too much reality” - though we should add the qualification that in Spark’s world, it’s by no means clear that humankind can bear any reality, ever.
   These themes are present in all Spark’s novels; but they as seldom as starkly, or as darkly, present as they are in The Driver’s Seat. (It isn’t possible to discuss the book without giving away what happens. If you haven’t read The Driver’s Seat yet, I suggest you don’t go any further until you do.) It is a novel about a character, Lise, whose response to the new freedoms of the 60s - the travel, the clothes, the sexual opportunities, the new cults in diet and religion - is to have herself murdered. Not that we know that right from the start of the book; all we know is that Lise is odd. She reacts with an irrationality bordering on hysteria to a suggestion that she might buy a dress made of a new fabric which doesn’t stain. “‘Get this thing off me. Off me, at once.’” Again, we begin the book with questions: who is this crazy woman? Just how crazy is she? What’s so wrong with the idea of being stainless? We soon find that Lise claims her objection is to do with the implication that she spills things on herself. The attentive reader of Spark’s fiction might wonder if there is a religious issue lurking here, in a character who dislikes the idea of not being immaculate. It’s only on finishing the book, and perhaps especially on re-reading it, that we come to suspect Lise might have had plans for the skirt which involve its being stained by blood.
   Clothes are always important in Spark-world, but seldom as much as in The Driver’s Seat. Lise’s terrible outfits are clues to her derangement: having rejected the dress “with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple”, she ends up with “a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright Vs of orange, mauve and blue”. Lise’s clothes are modern, a sign of her freedom, as is the whole idea of her flying off to a southern (Mediterranean, we guess) city for a holiday on her own. But the modernity depicted in the novel is one that has many features that are disappointing, bathetic, or actively unwelcome.
   Spark is merciless about the little would-be grace notes of contemporary life, such as the airline’s “mid-morning compromise snack composed of salami on lettuce, two green olives, a rolled-up piece of boiled ham containing a filling of potato salad and a small pickled something, all laid upon a slice of bread”. That “laid upon” catches the deadliness of both the sandwich itself and the way the airline talks about it.
   Airline food is nasty; other sorts of modernity are more sinister. On the plane, Lise meets Bill, an obsessive advocate of macrobiotic food who seems to be running his own cult. He is bad news; just how bad we aren’t quite sure. In the unnamed southern city, the young people are using their new freedom to stage demonstrations that turn into riots. That is bad news, too. (There is no good news in The Driver’s Seat.) But we already know that something much more specifically, personally bad is going to happen to Lise, whose death we learn about very early in the book. Even as she is getting on the aircraft for her holiday, we know that “she will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14”.
   Who is responsible for this terrible fate? That is the question presiding over The Driver’s Seat, on a first reading. Which of the various unsuitable, deranged, or evilly intentioned male characters in the book will prove responsible for Lise’s death? The answer is the least comforting one possible: it is that Lise herself, more than anyone else, brings about her own end. She is a murderee, a person who is murdered, and she is so by choice. Indeed, it was the murderer who tried to avoid her, rather than the other way around. (When asked why he immediately moved to a different seat when sat near Lise on the plane, despite never having spoken to her or seen her before, he explains, “I was afraid.”)
   As for the question of why she does what she does, the novel does not presume to answer. “Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” The book is the description of an existential leap, an act of faith, of the darkest possible kind. It is a depiction of a capricious will, of an intention bent on bringing harm to itself. This is the last and most disturbing of the freedoms abused in The Driver’s Seat. Lise is mad, of course, but knowing that doesn’t help. The book poses the question, who is in the driver’s seat? One solution to that conundrum might be to say: Lise. We could also say, Spark; or even, God. What the novel makes clear, however, is that none of these answers brings any comfort.
   There are no bad Spark novels; her consistency is one of the eerie things about her. But some of the books are less well-known than others, and it is fair to say that The Driver’s Seat is not one of her most famous books. That, I think, is because it doesn’t tell us a single thing that we want to hear. The Driver’s Seat is cruel and violent and dark. It is also, in its way, a masterpiece. No one could read it and mistake its force. Only Muriel Spark would have dreamed of writing it. The book’s near-jaunty tone would, in some fictional universes, be at odds with its jet-black content. In Spark-world, they go together like murderer and victim.
   — The Guardian

The collection of poems by Norwegian playwright and poet is unique in the sense that it serves a much more practical purpose than just a brief stimulation to the finer senses; in fact, this is a document recording history of the late 19th century. Not too long ago, but come to think of it, our historical knowledge on that period is quite indistinct. Oh yes, there are many books but somehow we, the general people never read them because these were the times that were never featured too prominently in the history books. Well, Ibsen gives us poetry and history, but to savour both a little patience is required.
   Ibsen wrote in a semi-abstract way, perhaps a style of his age and to salvage the meaning a little effort is necessary. However, the best feature of the book, the annotations and the small descriptions about the background of the poems, help the reader a lot.
   If this had not been there then common reader would have found the work impermeable. Thankfully, that does not happen and despite an approach which is non sequitur, the poet manages to reach out to the reader.
   Time and again, nature has found place and along with it we have events that make life a little above the mundane. Ibsen was a poet and like all poets he was never restricted by discipline of thought. Hence, we get a piece that extols his wife and then in another, we see him flying in la la land weaving a Utopia with his lover. But, his castles and the balcony by the sea crumble when reality has other plans. Ibsen’s poems talk of an era when changes in nature, the lighthouse, the palace and imperial ambitions were significant parts of human society and thus he speaks crisply of invading armies, fleet of foreign navies with colonial objectives and so on.
   The translator Anisur Rahman has already made a name through his Bangla presentations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea and here, he has done a superb job. He hasn’t allowed flippant language to steal Ibsen’s sombre and solemn mood and perhaps this is why the collection will appeal to those who are into poetry, not in the superficial sense but out of passion.
   Of late, Ibsen’s works are coming on stage and this collection of poems will help the literary inclined people to understand this great writer. So far, his poems existed in a scattered form and now with this collection, the Norwegian poet will lose the obscurity that surrounded him for so long.
   We expect more translations from Anisur Rahman, who has already become a modern age Ibsen aficionado. Special mention to the cover, which in deep purple maintains the mystique of Ibsen; in fact it seems to say that Ibsen is never too obvious. And, to be frank if poems are too straightforward then how will they manage to pique the senses?
   
   Ibsener Kabita
   (translation of Henrik Ibsen’s poems)
   Translator: Anisur Rahman from the English version by John Northam
   Cover Design: Nisar Hossain
   Pages: 96
   Publisher: Mowla Brothers
   Price: Tk100
   ISBN: 984 410 521-8

I had read a few columns and a couple of poems by Arunabh Sarkar before I came across this slim volume of poems. Arunabh was working at The Independent when I started writing for that newspaper, but I never met him at that time. It was only in March of this year, when 1 joined The News Today that I met Arunabh as my colleague for the first time. And it was the author himself who presented me with the Naria Fere Na, which is his third volume of poetry. He has published only nine books in the past 30 years, with three volumes of poetry, one title on journalism and five books for children, though he
   has written many works of fiction and poems, essays and columns, since his days of youth, in daily newspapers and periodicals.
   When 1 read his book 'Narira Fere Na', I found that not for nothing has my friend, poet Rafique Azad, named Arunabh as the 'king of lyrics.' The eighty-seven poems in this book range from three pages to four lines. I am translating for my readers his five-line poem Mousumi (Seasonal) 'Those favorite pictures of mine I had preserved / I have burnt them today! Because! Rather than explaining, let me give an example! In season all large and small! Trees have mangoes and lychees;/And some days later! All fruit is destroyed by time and storms.' This is a specific statement about a concrete emotion, and it echoes well beyond its given point of utterance:
   Reading, Montaigne said, is more dangerous than eating, because you can have a good look at frk4d before you put it in your mouth, whereas by the time you have read something it is already in your head. This applies especially to short lyric poems, which you can swallow in a moment, but which can permanently change your brain. Read Auden's 'Lay your sleeping head, my love' or Stevie Smith's 'Not waving but drowning', and they will be with you for life. It is said that when Nehru was dying, he wrote out the last lines of Robert Frost's 'Whose woods these are I think I know' on a piece of paper by his bed and kept repeating them. Arunabh also displays that power in his poetry to transform us. His 87 poems in this collection convey all the strangeness and exotica of love and life, and make the whole spectacle as familiar as the view across the street.
   Arunabh was born in Tangail in the year 1941 (29 May). His father was an educationist Shreejukta Kshetranath Sarkar (died 1967), and his mother was a housewife Shrijuktaa Shaila Sarker (died 1984). He was educated at Mirzapur High School and Saadat College, Karatia, and graduated from Calcutta University in English Language and Literature. Since 1967 he has worked in senior position in the leading Bangla and English newspapers of Dhaka, and is now the Features Editor at The News Today. As a freedom fighter he edited the first newspaper of the Liberation War 'Swadhinata' (weekly). He and his wife Aziza have a son and a daughter.
   Arunabh perceives in familiar objects elements of beauty that sometimes escape us, and sends us back to look at them again with newly delighted eyes. He is original, not only in vision, but also in sentiment, and so opens for us a world of strange and refreshing experiences. It is the fullness of his love for those things which we too most deeply cherish, that make his poems intense, yet with an absence at their heart.
   
   NARIRA FERE NA
   (women never return)
   by Arunabh Sarkar
   First published in February, 2006,
   by Osman Gani
   Agamee Prakashani, Dhaka
   87 pages
   Price Tk 90, US$ 3.00