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Author : Madeleine L'Engle
Genre : Fiction
Madeleine L’Engle is best known for her young reader series: A Wrinkle in Time and Meet the Austins, some of my favorite books growing up. Some may not know of her adult fiction. A Severed Wasp is a beautifully crafted story of classical music and Katherine Vigneras, a renowned concert pianist who has returned from Europe to her Brownstone on 10th Street in New York City to retire and come to terms with her memories. Now in her seventies, she encounters an old friend from her Greenwich Village days who, it turns out is the former Bishop of New York. Surprising, he asks her to give a benefit concert for the cathedral, and their friendship renews.
Even though neither of them were Jewish, Katherine was imprisoned during World War II and her husband was sent to Auschwitz and horribly tortured. As she adjusts to life in New York, so many memories surface, and she eventually puts them to rest. She realizes she would not want to have been without any part of her life, even the most terrible.
“You are ageless. You see, Madame Vigneras, you have lived and suffered and rejoiced, and it’s all there, in your face as well as your playing, and it is this quality of abundant life which is what draws me to people.”
“Why do the wicked flourish, and children die, there is continuing war and disease and untimely death> Why? I don’t know how it matters. I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. And from the moment of creation on, he suffers when any part of his creation suffers. Daily I add to his suffering, and only occasionally to his gladness. But he will not give up on me; he will not give us on any of us, until we have become what we were meant to be.”
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