Book notes, Fiction # The Driver's Seat By Muriel Spark / 1970 ★★★☆☆ First read in Aug 2022 --- This book should be read in one go, or in two goes at most. I wasn't able to do that and it took away from my experience and enjoyment of it.   The entire thing felt to me like looking at the last couple of pages of [[The Grass Is Singing]] that I had just read earlier, under the microscope. A _whydunnit_ (never heard this term before) in which a manic _murderee_ (never heard this one either) precipitates towards her end. This precipitation, the haste that you can feel throughout the whole thing, the agitation of it - as a central symptom of mania - is the main thing I was left with.  It was both weird and plain and I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it, but I did enjoy the aftertaste it left me with and thinking about it afterwards.  * A murdaree is a person getting themselves killed on purpose. * A strage little book, this one. An exploration of mania and manic personality disorder wrapped in an atypical murder mystery. ## Quotes **Pg. 26** - This funny reminder that people used to smoke in aeroplanes. It was only fully banned in the early 2000s.  _“The plane purrs forward. The no-smoking lights go out and the loudspeaker confirms that the passengers may now unfasten their seat-belts and smoke.”_ **Pg. 92** _'Oh,' she says, 'the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you're sitting in a café, the last one left.'_