Word: ashton
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Incense to Idols, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. In this impressive second novel by the author of Spinster, an amoral and witchingly lovely woman spins a treacherous human web, in which men snared by beauty must ultimately confront God, death and salvation...
...excellent novel is just that: two of them by the same author form strong evidence that the world has another fine writer. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's first novel. Spinster, astonished critics last year with its power, insight, and. to use a phrase of her own, pride of word. The only reservation tenable was that since the author, a middle-aged New Zealand schoolteacher, had written of a middle-aged woman who taught school, it was possible that the force of her novel sprang from circumstance, not art. Incense to Idols removes this possibility...
Flow of Words. The author's heroine is shatteringly beautiful, amoral, narcotically charming, and men queue up to destroy themselves for her. Such a description might come from any dust jacket, but Novelist Ashton-Warner's portrait is all but unique. Germaine de Beauvais. a young Parisian concert pianist who exiles herself to New Zealand after the death of her husband, is a woman as convincingly evoked as Emma Bovary or Molly Bloom. The narrative is a first-person reverie; a stream of consciousness, then a torrent, then a willful, feminine shutting down of thought. Germaine is mirrored...
...open ocean and the waves quartering in on the windward rail, the crew started swaying fore and aft. The attempted stage illusion, like the ballet to which it belonged, was handsome, arresting-and just short of convincing. The occasion: the U.S. premiere last week of Ondine, Choreographer Frederick Ashton's most ambitious work to date...
...Britain before the Royal Ballet brought it to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, Ondine was freely adapted by Ashton himself from a fairy tale by German Writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843) describing the love of a water sprite for a mortal.* Although it bore all the marks of Ashton's familiarly gentle, classically oriented manner, it discarded the classical ballet conventions that appear in such Ashton successes as Cinderella and Sylvia. What he was trying to suggest, says Ashton, was "the ebb and flow of the sea: I aimed at an unbroken continuity...