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Title: Remember you must die
Review: All the characters in Muriel Spark's novel are old people. There is Dame Lettie Colson who is pestered - but perhaps it is an illusion - by anonymous telephone calls with a voice saying only "Remember you must die", her brother Godfrey and his wife Charmian who live in a sort of ménage à trois. Their life doesn't get easier as they advance in age: senility and physical decrepitude are handicaps they try to live with, sometimes conscious of them but not always.Then there are the twelve female occupants of the Maud Long Medical Ward, a nursing home, who spend their time gossiping about petty scandals, mostly about wills being rewritten in the favour of another person for some trivial behavioural reason.The plot is both funny and macabre because all the characters are mean, jealous, curious, witty or confused, probably as they used to be all their life. It seems that old age does not transform our character much, for better or for worse.
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