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| Stephen Vizinczey | |
Hungarian-Canadian novelist and critic Stephen Vizinczey, who "was a distinguished member of the diaspora that fled Hungary after the revolution of 1956" and, as the author of In Praise of Older Women (1965), "also belonged to the select band of writers who invent a book title that becomes familiar to millions who will never read the book," died August 18, the Guardian reported. He was 88.
Vizinczey's life and work "were informed by his first two and a half decades in Hungary, which left him fearless and ready to take on all comers," the Guardian wrote. After his escape, he arrived in Canada with "no more than 50 words of English and no money, but gradually picked up the language and found backers for a new magazine in Montreal, Exchange, featuring unpublished Canadian writers, among them the young Leonard Cohen." When the magazine folded, he moved to Toronto and eventually married Gloria Harron, a program organizer at the CBC, with whom he went to London in 1966 to promote his first novel, In Praise of Older Women.
"It became a key book of the '60s, a bestseller in France, and a Penguin Modern Classic in 2010," the Guardian wrote. Vizinczey produced two more novels, An Innocent Millionaire (1983) and If Only (2016), "meticulously working to make them as perfect as possible, writing and rewriting over five decades.... No one wrote more keenly about the mean abuse of power or the cruelty of the rich. To these are here added fantastical elements in the spirit of Swift and Mark Twain."
Vizinczey also wrote regularly for the Times in the late '60s and early '70s, and later for the Sunday Telegraph. His reviews and essays are gathered in two collections, The Rules of Chaos (1969) and Truth and Lies in Literature (1986), which "are both timeless and very much of their time," the Guardian noted, adding that he "measured all modern writing--and his own--against what he called 'the Company of the Dead,' who never failed to inspire him.... He spent his last years revisiting the Company, watching French films of the '50s, keeping watch over the slowly failing Gloria and blogging with new, young readers about the masterpieces he never tired of: King Lear, The Idiot, Candide. Above all, he never ceased to grieve over what he saw as the infantilization and hypersensitivity of the modern world."