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Editorial Review Product Description
Lise, driven to distraction by an office job, leaves everything and flies south on holiday - in search of passionate adventure, the obsessional experience and sex. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city. ... Read more Customer Reviews (9) 
Muriel's favorite novella
Who else can let you know at the start how the story's to end and yet hold your tension to the last? This is a brilliant piece which shows her originality and dark dry humor.
This Is Not A Book -It's A Pamphlet
I returned this book/pamphlet to Amazon as I felt ripped off.The price was so overpriced for a very small in size and only 100 pages.I read the other reviews before buying and some of them were longer than the book.
Takes an hour to read. Takes a lifetime to forget (and you can't)
There is no writer more despicable than the reviewer who spoils a book by revealing significant plot points.
[Okay, no writer who opines about the arts. Some political commentators come to mind who are surely destined for a special hell.]
But what do you call a novelist who begins the third chapter --- the third chapter --- of her book with this about Lise, the main character:
"She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14."
Try this: genius.
The Driver's Seat is just l00 pages. It will take most of you about an hour. But in that hour, you are in for an experience even more head-splitting than you'll get from Jim Thompson's aptly named The Killer Inside Me.
Because --- obviously --- this book is about something considerably trickier than who-gets-killed.
So the first brilliance of Muriel Spark's writing is its stunning originality; this is a book that really makes sense only backwards, when you finally have all the information to understand what happened. A close second is the writing. "Surgical" is often used to describe Spark's prose, and in this, her most unsettling novel, you can see why.
In a line here, a line there, we learn that Lise is 34 years old. She lives in the north of Europe, perhaps Sweden. She has worked in an accounting office since she was 18, with the exception of "the months of illness" --- and from the clothes she buys in the opening chapters and her strained, off-balance encounters with other people in the first few pages, we clearly get she's had a breakdown and is now having another. She lives alone. She's no oil painting:
"Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and a judging mouth, a precision instrument, a detail-warden of a mouth; she has five girls under her and two men."
A dull woman? That's just the point. You'd never notice her, but on the last day of her life, you'd certainly feel her --- and you'd find her really creepy. The customers in a clothes store feel her; she makes them "gasp and gape". Her co-workers sit, silently, as she tells them, through hysterical laughter and tears, that her vacation will be "the time of her life." And on the plane that takes her south, presumably to Italy, she so terrifies the man next to her that he bolts out of his seat.
On and on it goes, a nightmare of inappropriate conversation, off-putting behavior, fevered action. She's supposed to have a date with her dream man --- where is he? "The torment of it," Lise says. "Not knowing exactly where and when he's going to turn up."
What's going on here? Is this a thriller? A search for the dream man that suddenly veers from romance to violence? There are cops jumping in from time to time --- is this a detective novel?
All of the above. And more. With a resolution you don't see coming and then can't see how it could have ended any other way.
"The Driver's Seat" was published --- as "a metaphysical thriller" ---in 1970. Spark was already a literary powerhouse, thanks to "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", her 1962 novel about a spinster schoolteacher in Edinburgh, Scotland. It had been published --- in its entirety --- in The New Yorker. On stage, it starred Vanessa Redgrave. Completing the triumph was the 1969 film, starring Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for best actress in the title role.
"The Driver's Seat" was immediately recognized as a new kind of book: a traditional, last-day-of-life narrative, told with uncommon brevity and objectivity. Spark wrote more than twenty novels; this was one of her favorites. And her most prescient: you can see the accuracy of this close study of alienation and dislocation on the faces of untold people walking on any street. Or just watch the quirky, disturbing movie version of "The Driver's Seat" --- with Elizabeth Taylor in the leading role and Andy Warhol in the cast.
Muriel Spark wrote her novels in composition books, using one side of the page. No typewriters or computers for her --- she preferred pens that were not just new, but never touched by others. Rewriting? To her, that was the pastime of hacks; she rarely revised.
"The Driver's Seat" is proof she didn't need to.
Love it....
I'm surprised to see that there is no review posted for this book.It was a gem of a find for me, one of those books that I found while browsing for nothing in particular, and it sounded interesting at the very least.Since then I have come to enjoy Muriel Spark very much, though for nostalgic reasons this book remains one of my favorites.I have read it time and time again, and it's one of those rare experiences that lingers each time.
The book chronicles the vacation holiday of an unsettled, eccentric woman named Lise who is searching for her "boyfriend" in another city.To say more would be to give away wonderful, dissident chords within the book.I think it's one of the greatest parts of the experience Spark gives her readers- it's all a bit off-key, a bit awkward, a bit like watching a train as it lumbers down the track with the knowing that something bad is going to happen.The book follows none of the orthodoxies of most writing, at least in my mind, because while there is an obvious beginning and end, one gets the impression that much of the implied story began a very long time ago and that the future of Lise might include stalking the streets of this foreign city and its more benign tourists.I left my first reading with more questions than answers, but it was a very good thing within this context.There is nothing in Lise that can be contained very efficiently, including what one might expect of her, and so while the story ends in the shortterm with the insertion of the back of this tiny book, somewhere in the mind it is possible for Lise to continue to wander aimlessly through the imagination and the many doors found there.
As effective as the characterization, the sparse narrative is eerie and fantastic and shows restraint where others might provide a deluge of interesting yet ineffectual description and leaves us wanting more in many cases.But, like a scolded child we realize that- as the title implies- there is another who knows better than we who is maneuvering this vehicle and we are totally at her disposal.As a reader, this book was about acceptance and a certain amount of perseverence, because there were times when I truly felt dread reading about Lise and the assortment of characters that she encounters on her journey.It's a book I have never forgotten and one that sticks out in my mind as one of the better pieces I've had the pleasure of reading.
I recommend this book to those who enjoy subtle, creeping turmoil instead of the blood and monsters that pepper popular suspense.This is not about the man with the axe around the next corner, or the modern psychopath stalking their prey.At least, it's not clearly any of these things.It is the bubbling of something more than every-day-ho-hum under the surface of what appears normal (if slightly eccentric) human behavior, and it's got plenty of twists in store for those who decide to take it on.A wonderfully scary book, and a symphony of slightly sour notes building to a creepy, determined finale.
Converting a cliché into a classic
In this short sharp shock of a novel, Muriel Spark converts cliché into reality.How often has one heard, after news of a reported rape, or murder, or both, the facile comment "She asked for it"?From the outset of "The Driver's Seat" we know the fate that awaits the strange, driven, calculating Lise; and it is a signal indication of Spark's unsparing skill that the reader is trapped in suspense nonetheless.To read this tale takes little more than an hour because, once you start it, it will not leave you alone till it is done.Spark demonstrates what "asking for it" would in fact entail; and permits us to judge for ourselves the distance between that, and being the genuine victim of such a crime---through the sheer power of storytelling alone.
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