Word: wasps
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...wasp] was sucking jam on my plate and I cut him in half. He paid no attention merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed verged esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened...
...that the soul be cut away"-ring truer than any of L 'Engle's accounts of death, shame and estrangement. The sections shows that the author's strength is still her ability to make questions of good and evil seem human and dramatic: the unnecessary clutter of A Severed Wasp suggests that she has mistaken her topic, but not her theme...
...protagonist of her newest novel A Severed Wasp, the retired pianist Katherine Forrester Vigneras, last appeared as an aspiring teenage artist in L 'Engle's first published novel. The Small Rain. "I always knew I would go on and find out what happened to Katherine later in life," she says, "but I had to grow up enough to find out first." The same half whimsical treatment of her creations carries through to the minor characters, such as one Felix Bodeway who becomes Katherine's closest friend in A Severed Wasp after playing a decidedly tangential role in her youth...
...Felix in Wasp is a retired bishop-specifically, the retired bishop of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City, where L 'Engle has an office-and the haziness of his position between fiction and reality typifies the rest of L 'Engle's work. Several earlier novels are set in the same Upper West Side environs of the cathedral, which are described with enough detail and care to give visitor a shock of recognition at the subway stop. L 'Engle regularly sends her characters off to drink hungarian coffee at the same Colombia University coffee shop to which...
More and more, the characters in each successive novel grappic with the same religious and psychological dilemmas that L 'Engle confronts regularly as the cathedral's writer-in-residence and Laypreacher. The title of A Severed Wasp comes from a George Orwell quotation about the death of society's religious beliefs and the excision of modern man's soul. L 'Engle describes herself as "a striving Christian-striving to be Christian somehow in a world where Christians are doing such terrible things...