» Update your details

• Extract
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Product details
• Interview

• Biography

Synopsis

Growing up in war-torn Hungary, the narrator András Vajda, discovers that the charms of young girls are lost on him, and seeks out the embraces of older women. From his first disastrous encounter with the formidable Fräulein Mozart at a US army camp to his passion for Maya, a married woman, through to his turbulent affair with a reporter’s wife in Canada, he recounts how his amorous adventures with different middle-aged women have taught him about sex, love and the ways of the world.

'You cannot put it down: witty, moving and it's all about sex' Margaret Drabble

'A masterpiece ... dazzling ... like all great novels, it shows the truth about life' Le Monde

'At the basis of pleasure, of eroticism, Vizinczey places consciousness. His novel consists of scenes which you can see ... Stupefying: it leaves you breathless with excitement. Here, everything is living ardour, inexhaustible fervour' Giorgio Montefoschi, Corriere della Sera.

Visit Stephen Vizinczey's website.

Stephen Vizinczey is also on Facebook, where you can view his upcoming events.

Reviews

Customer Review: 03 September 2010

Reviewer: MKW

'My father read "In Praise of Older Women" in the late 1970''s and enjoyed it. So, when I saw it in the shops, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about and to see if perspectives had changed over the years. Well from page one I was immediately taken into the world of a young mans view to life and his encounters, especially with women. As I sat outside of a cafe and read the first page I became so absorbed to the point that a waiter had to ask me if I wanted to move inside, as it was starting to rain. I looked up and indeed it was raining. With that I returned to reality. A real page turner right to the end...once again Dad was right. MKW '

Interview

When and why did you start working on In Praise of Older Women, your debut novel?  How long did it take you to write?
In Montreal in the mid-Fifties I knew a girl who was approaching her 23rd birthday and was miserable because she was growing old. I wrote a short story about her and called it In Praise of Older Women. Seven years later I had the novel in which she didn’t figure at all.

Having published the first edition yourself, how do you feel about its worldwide success?
Success is something you enjoy when it is over. Remembering it is very nice, it encourages you to go on. But while you are in the spotlight – it is just stress and guilt about the number of letters you didn’t reply to – the answers you gave to questions which could have been better, etc.

What is it, do you think, about the novel that connects with so many people?
People connect to books which expresses their own particular truth. All good novels could be summarized by two questions: Do you remember? Did you know? So those readers who remember and those who want to know what a writer is saying are that writer’s audience. Judging by the response of the men and women I heard from, those readers who are comfortable or happy with their sexuality enjoy In Praise of Older Women - some are even enthusiastic about it. This includes also my homosexual friends. Those to whom fate has dealt a bad card, who have had more pain than joy out of sex, tend to hate the novel. I never knew what it was to be loathed until In Praise of Older Women became a “success”. The very reasons why some people love a book are the same reasons why others hate it.

Could you talk about the cross-generational elements in the novel?
The main source of the growing ignorance, misery and brutality around us –the disintegration of society - is the increasing isolation of the generations from each other. Civilized society needs cross-generational contact; without it you lose a sense of continuity and history. A society which practices the segregation of the generations is a disaster – and the youth cult glamorizes it, widening the gap between the generations even further. The youth cult celebrates ignorance and inexperience as the summit of life and happiness from which there is nowhere to go but down – a belief that lays the foundation for lifelong anxiety, frustration, unhappiness and all the evils unhappiness breeds.

It is a fact of life that older women are more attractive and can give greater joy than younger women, but this is not just about when a woman is most desirable and most beautiful, but about the value society puts on experience, on maturity.

Could you talk a bit about the inspiration for the main character?
All the characters are myself - nothing is invented, just rearranged.  Every character who comes to life from the printed page has something of the author in him or her. All the characters, including the women, in In Praise of Older Women have some characteristic, some feeling or mood that comes from me. That is universally true of all writers.  Laurence Olivier said about acting - answering the question of how he created a character: “From myself, from observation of other people and from technique.” I think the same is true of writers.

Technique is the easiest to explain and the hardest to do - to say only what is relevant and say it with the right words. Mark Twain said that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.” I tend to overwrite and then spend most of my time cutting and changing words and sentences.

Life is too fast, too chaotic and it is difficult for us to understand our own experiences. It happens to everybody: years later you look back at a critical event in your life and you see its significance, its bearing on what followed, but rarely at the time. Our experiences are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We don’t know much about the background of events and people, we don’t know what effect any experience will have on us – we don’t necessarily understand our own feelings. The novelist is the person who makes a picture from the jigsaw pieces scattered all around us.

How did you write In Praise of Older Women?
How do you write a novel? You LIVE inside the characters; you live inside the experience, the scene. I can write only when I can forget about myself, or rather when I transform into the characters I write about.  This is really a hopeless question because there is no way to explain it to people who don’t have the ability to be somebody else how it works. Every time you are asked this question, people hope for an answer which tells them that you do this or that – and there they go, they are writers! Actually not many writers have the ability to be somebody else, which is why there are so few real writers.

How do you react to criticism?
I grew up in the Hungarian National Theatre. Part of my studies at the Hungarian RADA, the state’s theatre and film college, was being an assistant to the great directors of the National Theatre. I was really a coffee-boy and note-taker to the director during rehearsals.  We had some great actors, worshipped like demigods – yet they listened even to stagehands. It didn’t matter who said something, anything, to them - you didn’t have to be a somebody to get their attention. Even I could criticise a great actor during a break; he would listen, and if I said something that caught his imagination, he had no hesitation about changing some aspect of his performance. First this was a shocking surprise, but through 5 formative years it got into my blood, so to speak. It doesn’t matter who is right during rehearsals, what matters is the première.  So I don’t mind criticism; often it helps me to improve what I’ve written. I am not so much a writer as a re-writer; it is very rarely that I hit on the right word at the first try, or even the fourth try.

You’ve said that your stepdaughters 'made me understand adolescence all over again'. Could you talk about this a bit more?
I was thirty when I married their mother. They were brilliant and tough 11- and 12-year-olds and they brought back memories of my own adolescence. Their savage wit – typical of teenage girls, which I had found most hurtful when I myself was a teenager - reminded me of my own teenage years and later on saved me from taking myself  too seriously – a great occupational hazard for writers. 

But the most important thing was perhaps their intensity about everything. It was infectious. It revived in me, too, the intensity of my adolescence.

Who are the writers – classical or modern – whom you admire most?
Hungary’s greatest playwright is Shakespeare, translated by the great Hungarian poets in the 19th century. The Hungarian language’s adolescence was the 19th century, very similar to Elizabethan English. While I was growing up in Budapest Shakespeare played in the repertory and there were at least a couple of his plays on every week. “Admire” is nothing, he was one of the masters who formed me. Stendhal and Balzac have been my gods since my early teens, together with Zsigmond Móricz, one of giants of the 20th century. Unfortunately for world literature, he wrote in Hungarian. In my study I have 2 blown-up pictures: a lithograph of Stendhal and a portrait of Balzac.  I often look at them to gain courage. I also had a lithograph of Kleist (whom I discovered only in my 30s), but it was a poster on thin paper from my German publisher and it eventually wore off. Later I learned and read more of the giants - Laclos, the forerunner of Stendhal, and of course, Swift, Defoe, Sterne, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Mark Twain, the greatest American writer (and I don’t mean Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer). The Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and the short novels of Lazarillo de Tormes profoundly influenced me, as did Italo Svevo. Of my recent discoveries, I liked best  the Ukrainian-Jewish-French novelist, Irène Némirovsky, who was murdered in Auschwitz but whose books survive her. (I guess I have a particular affinity for writers who belong to many places.)

Product details

Shipped within 24hrs.
FREE UK Delivery*

• Full delivery details

• » View your basket