In the Company of Angels'' embraces both holocaust and resurrection, polarities of despair and hope that strain the outer limits of our imagining. Within the spare pages of this slender novel lurks enough plot to float a melodramatic triple-decker. Anne has a tragic love affair with a German spy who later becomes commander of the local occupation, and she subsequently embraces a religious order whose convent houses a headquarters of the Resistance. A mad religious visionary named Minouche marries a respectable man named Remy Mathot, owner of a factory that makes the most delicious chocolates in Belgium. But these events are sketched in shorthand as a skeletal framework for the novel's true concern, which is related in a way more akin to poetry than prose.
Spirit animates things.
And to paraphrase and summarize such finespun fiction must inevitably be as inadequate as any attempt to retell your most amazing dream the morning after.