Word: sylvia
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GREENSTONE, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Maori and British-descended New Zealanders come together in a graceful parable of age and childhood, mysticism and reality, told with talent enough to create a subtle celebration of life...
GREENSTONE by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. 217 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Nothing is more boring and embarrassing than an amateur conjurer. Magic must be perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real...
...affectation as a rule. Here the device becomes a knob opening a door to the trancelike continuum of childhood-particularly that of the magic child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness. The boys are fighting over something real-her, a princess...
From anthropology, Castro-Cid moved on to anatomy. Arriving in Manhattan with his wife, Harper's Bazaar Cover Model Sylvia, he spent hours peering into musty display cases in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. Says he: "My paintings grew to be surrealist abstractions with the hint of skeletal joints expressing patterns of growth." To add motion to them, he made toylike, motor-driven robots. They jousted like a 21st century Punch and Judy show, chased tiny balls with spinning hoops in an electronic version of Alexander Calder's 1926 "Circus...