Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MOST BOOK JACKETS are meaningless eye catchers, but the designer of Madeleine L 'Engle's latest novel exhibits a starting perspicacity. Behind plain white lettering. A Severed Wasp is covered with dense tapestry like patterns of violet, lavender and deeper purples, the type of ribbed stripes that appear inside the covers of very old books. Only the volume's square boundaries give any shape to the intricate interplay of threads and colors...
...inner reaches of A Severed Wasp share some of the same intricacy, the same denseness, and finally the same frustration. Tracing the first summer of retirement of Katherine Vigneras, a world-renowned pianist, Wasp gradually unfolds the story of Katherine's tribulation-filled career and life through her encounters with a group of bishops and deans of St. John the Divine's Cathedral in New York City, where she has at last settled down for good. She has always tended to accumulate proteges, and within two weeks of her arrival she is heavily involved in the lives of a career...
...Wasp, though not L 'Engle's first "adult" book, carries all the faint creakiness of a hitherto cloister adult valiantly tackling "the real world." Her multiplicity of competing threads and emotions occasionally betrays her into a line straight out of soap opera ("She did not want the perspicacious doctor to guess that she was fascinated by the attractive young bishop"), but more often it reduces Katherine to a passive, dubious on looked at the complexity. She hardly knows what to think when her old friend, Felix, unexpectedly tells her the spent years cruising the gave bars Greenwich Village or when...
...published an article in Barricada [the official government newspaper] boasting that Sandinista soldiers had killed counterrevolutionaries coming out of Honduras. This was the same shooting I was reading about. The report I was reading said the people were searching for food and lived in Nicaragua. They had gone from Waspán [a town on the river] to Bilwaskarma in their canoes. I couldn't understand this. I fought against the barbarities Somoza committed against the Nicaraguan people. But as the revolutionary process increased, the level of class hatred increased. Among the officers, an attitude was created that...
Mills traces Mailer's desire to be accepted by the WASP establishment to his career at Harvard, where the Jews were sequestered together very much outside the Harvard establishment. Although Mailer wants to be the quintessential American, he has remained interested in his Brooklyn Jewish past, writing occasionally for Commentary magazine. Without attempting to reconcile this tension, Mills shows Mailer's underlying sensitivity to ethnic roots through events in both his private life and in his writing. For example, she observes that Mailer intermingles his speech with Southern drawls and Irish brogues, concealing his roots...