Reason read: Reading 1001, botm. I like the previous books I've read by Ms Spark and expected to like this one. I also like the subject matter. Old people exploring death. A group of people start receiving anonymous phone calls and tell them to "know that they will die". Which is a true statement but can also be quite sinister. This is not a mystery and we never know who is making the calls. One of the characters surmises that it is "Death" that is calling. I liked it but felt like it could use a rereading. ( )

This is a funny and entertaining, but still rather puzzling book about a bunch of old people and their intrigues and fears sparked by an unknown caller who tells them not to remember to die (i.e., memento mori). I enjoyed this quite a bit, and the audiobook narrator was marvelous as she portrayed very distinctly the voices of so any characters of both sexes. In the end, however, it all wrapped up without the bang I was hoping for, although there is at least one very big shock along the way. ( )

I had just finished reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, a memoir about working in a crematory, when I started reading this book which opens with a scene from a crematory in which a coffin is proceeding along a conveyer belt to be burned. How coincidentally weird!
It was challenging to remember that this book was written in 1959 as it seemed so much more contemporary than that. Issues of infidelity, death, aging, and deception are addressed head-on and emotions and fears surrounding all of these are met realistically.
This was a very enjoyable read despite its subject matter. ( )

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. ( )

I may be the last person on earth to know that Memento Mori means "Remember that you must die" or "Remember death". My freshman English professor from college would have been appalled, she thought we should all know Latin. I tend to agree with her, as she explained, it helps us understand our language and increase our vocabulary. (Also, I would then know common Latin phrases such as Memento Mori.)

Anyway, Memento Mori, the book, was everything you would expect from Muriel Spark - her insight, wit and clever (and not-so-clever) characters are delightful. It is now my second favorite of Spark's books - the first being The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and my third, and only other, The Girls of Slender Means. ( )