Madeleine L'Engle!

I just finished reading The Irrational Season by Madeleine L'Engle, and I'm still caught up in it. This book is just washing over me like what? Like rain?--Like--I can't even tell you what the book is about because I'm so caught up in gushing over it. All the same, I reprint the content of my review here, if only for your amusement. She's an interesting woman, that's for sure, and probably the most thoroughly feminine writer that I've ever tolerated, much less loved:

The Irrational Season by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh, I loved it and I love her. She's a challenge, and no mistake. I'm a big fan of complete and utter honesty, and yet L'Engle is sometimes a little too honest even for me. Some of her theology is a mite odd, but she is so incredibly real, and speaks to me in terms I can understand that might seem a bit too intuitive to some folks, but L'Engle must have been okay with that.

L'Engle embraces mystery. That's what I like best about her. She confesses her lifelong bouts with atheism, and yet her theism is more real than some people's sincerest belief, and that is one of the things that appeals to me about her. And her understanding--she understands so much.

Still sometimes she says things I had rather she didn't say.

This is a completely unhelpful review. If you've read much of her non-fiction you already know what her writing is like. Her mind flits from idea to idea, and she captures this beautifully on paper. Her writing is less rigorously structured than most, and yet she circles around certain ideas, repeating phrases, repeating her idea's patterns to form a meditation on what it means to be God's creature.

Mostly she writes about the sadness and pain of living in a world corrupted. She has reproduced her own poetry liberally throughout. So much of this book is autobiographical, in fact that is probably its official category, but L'Engle said that all of her writing was autobiographical, because in order to write something she had to know it, know it intimately, personally and well.

Like I said, not a useful review, but I think Madeleine L'Engle was a marvelous person, who wrote a marvelous book, and this one has me wanting to read or reread everything the woman ever wrote. And that is that.

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