Word: zealand
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PATRICK B. VINCENT Christchurch, New Zealand...
...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...
...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 in the flow of words as well...
Although she is an accomplished pianist. Germaine has no profound love for music -or for anything else-and it is merely a whim that brings her to a clattering New Zealand town to study with a master who is himself an exile there. She meets him: "'Give me some more of that wine Léon.' I investigate the state of my hair. 'I feel better now.' I watch the green-clad form humbling and anxiously pouring my wine not spilling any this time taking the greatest care. Can't you men be pathetic? Especially...
...CRANE Hastings, New Zealand...