Word: vorontosov
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Where the book called up images of lovely backwoods flora and fauna, the film has the artsy-craftsy exotica of Trader Vic's. The book's Anna Vorontosov was an interestingly unbalanced woman whose salvation came from the joyous dangers she found in teaching; the movie's Anna alternates between being cute and fighting for her virtue. One moment she plods through a witless musical routine about Pogo, the next she is braining Hero Harvey for ripping open her blouse (with cretinous whinnies of "Open sesame!"). And where it was right for the hero to blow...
This first novel by a woman in her forties is an astonishing work, one of the few rewarding books of a so-so season. The spinster of the title is Anna Vorontosov, a schoolteacher in back-country New Zealand. She is a small woman of uncertain age, whose passions are still young because she has never used them. Gifted but a little balmy, Anna primes herself for school each morning with half a tumbler of brandy, frequently gets the weeps, talks persuasively to trees and flowers, has stupendous headaches in Technicolor. Wildly alive, Anna flinches only at the thought...
...Anna Vorontosov is a major literary creation, a woman forever leaping to the barricades against mediocrity. The joy of teaching has seldom been more beautifully described than in this book. It seems only right-and not melodramatic-that Paul, a fellow teacher who respects neither the minds nor the bodies of his pupils, should blow out his brains. It is Author Ashton-Warner's view that teaching is a most dangerous activity, particularly at the level where the untutored five-year-old first collides with the civilized world. They may seem adorable infants now, but they are the whores...
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