![]() ![]() As medical treatment and technology continue to improve, especially in affluent developed countries, death is postponed longer and longer for more and more people, but this is a mixed blessing. The novel is about death – in itself a timeless subject – but specifically about death as variously perceived, feared, denied, and anticipated by the elderly. ![]() Formally the novel seems as fresh and original today as it did when it was first published, and thematically more relevant to the preoccupations and anxieties of the present century's first decade than to those of the 50s. Perhaps the only period-specific detail that would require annotation for younger readers is that cars parked in the streets at night in those days were obliged to have side and rear lights switched on. But it was not a typical 50s novel, and it has not dated. 'M emento Mori remains one of the great novels of the 1950s," Martin Stannard says in his excellent biography, Muriel Spark (2009), and indeed it does. ![]()
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