The Driver's Seat
Lise begins her final journey not with a whimper, but with the jarring visual discord of a dress—a lemon-yellow skirt paired with a bodice of violent, unnatural pink. In the sterile, fluorescent-lit boutiques of her unnamed northern city (could be in Scotland, where Spark is from?), she rejects the tasteful and the subdued, opting instead for a costume that ensures she cannot be missed. There is a brittle, porcelain quality to her composure, an existential restlessness that Muriel Spark renders...
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