madeleine l'engle r.i.p.

the author of one of my all-time favourite books - a wrinkle in time - madeleine l'engle died yesterday of natural causes at the age of 88. the first response by the new york times is here. with regard to "wrinkle", it says:

"The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians."

as with the narnia books of c.s.lewis, especially "the last battle", there was a strong xian background to l'engle's writing. when i first read these books it went right over my head. these days, while i am no longer so drawn to the final narnia book, i still love to read "wrinkle" and also "the young unicorns".

the ny times ends with the following:

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

have a great weekend!

yahoo obit
new york magazine
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