Spark in Time

By Xlibris US

SPARK IN TIME is Toni Rabens long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut TERRACOTTA SMOKE in 2011. Here again, Ms. Raben creates provocative, often spellbinding poetry. Rich in her trademark, ethereal imagery and one-of-a-kind voice that ranges from lush to blunt, SPARK IN TIME seamlessly weaves moments that are hard-hitting, heartbreaking and even hilarious.

There is only one Toni Raben. SPARK IN TIME is more evidence of her unique presence in the poetry world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499051063

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Toni Raben.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014912509

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-5109-4

                Softcover        978-1-4990-5108-7

                eBook             978-1-4990-5106-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/17/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

635785

CONTENTS

ALL THE ANSWERS

All The Answers

Transcending

When I Sleep

In The House

Merge Into Oneness

In The Cabana

MOTHER MOUNTAIN

Mother Mountain

Senorita

Big Plans

Peace To All Mothers

Spark In Time

Her Love Is Not Definable

He Was Waiting

For More Information Call La Leche League

Her Embrace

Dried Pages

Evil Stayed In Bed

SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING

The Morning Mist

Creation

A Lonely Pancake

At Breakfast She Was Luminous

I Began Without The Coffee

Another Model

Children Surfing

I Was This Morning Like A Peach

ME WITH THE CAMERA

Me With The Camera

The Closet

Men Who Cut Hair

Quentin Crisp

Hollow

I Should Have Waited

Reviews for Spark in Time

[tungsten_peerts · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Insanely enjoyable. This is the second Spark novel I've read (the first was the astonishing, short and brutal The Driver's Seat). Memento Mori is dry, veddy British, very acerbic and mordant. Damnation is it funny. If you are offended by frank treatments of aging and its indignities, do NOT read this. It looks like a mystery, but it really isn't one. It's just fun.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

/Dated, but still one of my all0-time favourites.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great novel about a somewhat neglected subject - old age. A someone who is fast approaching that state and who loves good literature this novel is a welcome addition to my reading experience. Highly recommended for all lovers of the modern novel.

[diefledermaus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dame Lettie Colston has been receiving mysterious phone calls from a man who only says “Remember you must die.” Pretty soon others in her family and social circle begin to be called upon also and speculations begin – is it a gang of people (the caller is always different)? A wave of mass hysteria? Something else entirely? While this is occurring, death is indeed rampaging through the ranks. Another perturbance in the Colston set is caused by the death of Lisa Brooke. Her family, her companion maid and her husband-under-convoluted-circumstances fight over her inheritance, and the maid, Mrs. Pettigrew, is hired by Lettie’s brother Godfrey to care for his ailing wife, formerly famous novelist Charmian. So starts a story of blackmail, adultery, murder, fetishes, secret marriages and May-December (80 yr old to 20 yr old) marriages.It is notable that almost all the characters are very old, over 70 years old. They all have their own personalities, petty rivalries, obsessions and secrets. It was definitely different from most books. Although past events are often alluded to and continue to affect the present, there are almost no flashbacks. Many books feature a character in his or her twilight years reflecting on the past so it was refreshing that this doesn’t happen here. Spark describes the day to day activities and conversations of the group. The group as a whole is somewhat inbred and terribly funny – they’re suspicious of outsiders, scornful of the 50/60 something set (though tolerant of the younger generation) and everyone has had an affair with/was in love with/was engaged to/had a rivalry with/worked for someone else. Some of the story takes place in a hospital ward and the main group of 70/80 year olds are rather horrified by the senile centenarian and near-centenarian group that moves in.The book is pretty funny, though maybe not in a laugh out loud kind of way. Some of the paranoia and obsession with changing wills is humorous but makes sense. Alec Warner is obsessed with cataloguing the lives of his elderly friends and his outlandish reactions are quite funny. He’s really a gossip-hound who notes down everything that happens to everyone and tries to be around when bad news hits so that he can take the pulses and temperature of his friends. If he can’t be there, he sends a letter with the news and puts in a request for the recipient to take and send his own stats. Percy Mannering’s ghoulish excitement over death, Mrs. Pettigrew’s all-around bad behavior and the codependent, competitive, constantly irritated marriage of Godfrey and Charmian were also funny. All this is related in Spark’s unadorned, straightforward prose which adds to the humor. Characters were constantly spouting inappropriate or horrible things, which failed to provoke a reaction – this reminded me a bit of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but a much more readable Compton-Burnett.

[chatterbox_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating novel that deals with death -- the awareness of death and age, and how secrets seem to become less significant with time. In it, a cluster of related septugenarians and octogenarians begin receiving telephone calls; the anonymous individual on the other end of the line simply tells them politely, "remember, you must die." Some are unnerved; others irritated; some are amused while others remain unflappable. All, however, seem to hear the voice in a different way -- to some, it's a young boy; others here the voice of a middle-aged man while one even hears a woman's voice deliver the warning. Is a gang at work? To Jean Taylor, the former maid of one of the callers, herself now suffering arthritically in the geriatric ward of a hospital, it's simply death on the other end of the phone. "If you don't remember Death, Death reminds you to do so," she tells Dame Lettie, the first of the recipients of the phone call.But while the plot ostensibly revolves around the mystery of the phone calls, in fact, Spark tries to deal with the even deeper mystery of human relationships. What is it that divides siblings from each other; a husband from a wife; a parent from a child? What kind of misunderstandings divide old friends? What secrets are kept in the name of friendship and domestic harmony? The phone calls become only a catalyst.It's a short and intriguing novel; and elegantly written, to boot. It's chock full of striking observation on the perils of aging and of death -- both of them thorny subjects -- and unexpected quirks and shifts in direction. Still, I've given it only four stars, because I felt that somehow the book itself ended up being as amorphous in its nature as the meaning of life itself can sometimes feel. Five stars for the reading experience, but marked down because I constantly was pulled out of the narrative with the question of Spark's intention as an author. Niggly, I know, but at least it's tempted me to read some more of her novels.

[copyedit52 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Acerbically humorous and insightful book about old people--seventy is the entry age to this club in Memento Mori--aging, dementia, nagging aches and pains, rewriting and vying to get into last testament wills, built around a crank or maybe not so crank phone call.

[loma_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An oddly funny and human, and humane, novel about aging and facing death. Far more good-natured and optimistic than most of Spark's novels.

[juva_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book about living and dying. Set in 1950s London, a group of elderly friends begin receiving upsetting phone calls by a stranger who says only, "Remember, you must die." In the wake of this uncomfortably direct advice, a number of curious secrets and old skeletons come shambling out of their respective closets. Beautifully told, haunting and humorous, this book will not soon be forgotten.

[ttaisi5editor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a subtle but fierce book, the kind of story that sneaks up on you and then, like one of the protagonists, gives you a firm whack on the head. Spark's writing is terse, clipped--but incredibly expressive for that. In 224 pages you're roped into the lives of this elderly cast of characters, and tightly bound; by the end, you don't want to let go, even as they all do.

[lara335 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

On the cover Julian Barnes describes Memento Mori as 'one of the great British novels of the last fifty years'. I am obviously missing something. A gentle 'comic' novel about a group of old people, none of whom said or did anything interesting. Read for a book group, and I'm glad there were only 226 pages to endure.

[sometimeunderwater · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Received lots of high praise, according to the quotes on the cover, but did nothing for me. A "darkly comic" novel that is neither funny nor actually that dark - just some old rich people dying, one of whom is murdered off-screen, the rest of mostly natural causes in an epilogue. There is an air of Roald Dahl about this, with the countless silly grannies ("granny trotsky, granny barnacle", etc) like the beginning of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It has no Dahl comedy or creativity however, and my overall experience was simply boredom.Muriel Spark can write very well, but none of that is on show here.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading 'Memento Mori' made me a little sad, as it so reminded me of my grandmother, who passed away seven years ago. It also tired me somewhat: a story whose characters all face imminent death through old age, and the sufferings they endure as they grapple with their decreasing faculties. Fortunately, Spark's fine writing shows through as always, and the characters are always true to themselves. Otherwise, this could have been a depressing chore of a book.

[allison7sivak · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyably mean. I didn't want Miss Pettigrew to inherit the money in the end; of all the characters, I liked the Mortimers, Miss Taylor, and Charmian the most, as those who were willing to live with their own shortcomings, as well as with those of others. They were the most peaceful characters in the book.My copy is an example of how a depressing series (Time Magazine books) can still exhibit nice design.

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A group of septuagenarians in late-1950s Britain are receiving upsetting phone calls: a man keeps harassing them, simply stating, "Remember, you must die." In Spark's hands, what would be a vehicle or device for a crime/thriller in the hands of someone like Agatha Christie instead becomes a tour de force of social commentary.

Like Christie, Spark uses social banter to explore and criticize social issues; in Memento Mori, Spark brings postbellum anxieties about class, gender, and death to bear on relationships between individuals. Unlike Christie, Spark is not concerned with placing the mystery at the center of her novel. Instead, Spark creates an often laugh-out-loud funny—and often bewilderingly and staggeringly cruel—portrait of a close-knit group of people who are actually not all that close-knit at all.

Spark's scope here is phenomenal, as is her mixture of farce, politics, and drawing-room comedy of manners. One is often reminded of writers like James and Elizabeth Bowen when reading Spark: her razor-sharp wit, her combination of high-brow and low-brow comedy, and her ability to expose idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies in social interactions are what make Memento Mori work so well as an attack on a very real fear—the fear of death after having lived through the death of the world, twice over.