Muriel Spark, "A Member of the Family" (Scotland)

It’s December 19. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Muriel Spark’s story, “A Member of the Family”:

Muriel Spark’s humour is dry, deep-cutting and utterly British. In novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori, Spark is able to cut through the facade of social conventions and reveal the sadness of the lives beneath, never in a supercilious tone but rather with quiet compassion. “A Member of the Family” is a story about an amorous triangle in which one of the participants is only intuitively aware of what happens. The setting in a bleak November in London, contrasted with the Austrian landscape in which the protagonists meet, lets the reader suspect that something more than what is being narrated is taking place between the lines.

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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2021 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians. And check back tomorrow for commentary on the next story!