In Praise of Older Women

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Seventy-four looked old then but with one exception, isn’t old enough to be one of the 20 interviewees in Maggie Kirkman’s book Time of Our Lives: Celebrating Older Women. The cut-off point is 1946. This generation is the last who grew up without television and although the book does not point this out explicitly, it becomes more relevant as we read about their various childhood experiences. Only a few years later, Baby Boomers were being brought up by television as much as school, church and family.

However, it soon becomes apparent that András is precisely that which he rallies against at the outset of the memoirs. He proves himself to be a rather despicable protagonist with highly questionable attitudes towards women. Despite his many claims to the contrary, his main problem with younger women seems not to be their dress or immaturity, but that he cannot entice them to sleep with him quite so easily as married or lonely women of more advanced years. His final documented conquest is told that ‘I got the worst of you … Here you are, a wise and beautiful woman, and I have to content myself with memories of a silly bitch at Lake Couchiching. It isn’t fair.’ Clearly András doesn’t seem to have learned much from his encounters, from the endless love and adoration that women have bestowed upon him. This gives the novel its bitter edge; András cannot see that his love of women is narcissistic, that he loves them for their ability to boost his esteem and for the size of their breasts, but still believes that he is above the teenage immaturity that defines him. This is not a man who loves women, but a man who loves himself.

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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Stephen Vizinczey in 2015. His third novel, If Only, which absorbed him for at least 20 years, was published in 2016. Photograph: Antonio Olmos These inspiring true stories of women who’ve made the most of their mature years “will get you fired up” (Becca Anderson, author of The Book of Awesome Women and Real Life Mindfulness). Vizinczey was born in Káloz, Hungary. [3] His first published works were poems which appeared in George Lukacs's Budapest magazine Forum in 1949, when the writer was 16. He studied under Lukacs at the University of Budapest and graduated from the city's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in 1956. He wrote at that time two plays, The Last Word and Mama, which were banned by the Hungarian Communist regime. He took part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and after a short stay in Italy, ended up in Canada speaking only 50 words of English, and eventually taking Canadian citizenship. He learned English writing scripts for Canada's National Film Board and the CBC. He edited Canada's short-lived literary magazine, Exchange. In 1966 he moved to London.

This isa fascinating collection of biographical sketches of dozens of women of a certain age who have excelled, inspired, and achieved. Learn how these women changed their respective fields of art, politics, science, mathematics, media, literature, business, activism, education, and more. Included are: Stephen Vizinczey, originally István Vizinczey [1] (12 May 1933 – 18 August 2021) [2] was a Hungarian-Canadian writer. Her fervent wish now is for her grandchildren to have rainforests and oceans as healthy as when she was young. She praises people such as David Sedaris, who, she says, never goes out walking without a garbage bag to collect litter, to make the world a little better for having passed through. As a Hungarian writing in English, Vizinczey writes with a lucidity and economy of prose that puts most native English writers to shame. For one so wise you won’t find a shred of ego in this modest little book. Only fun poked at himself, and by extension at all men and women, for the fools that love makes of us all. Vizinczey also manages to write about sex with more class than most writers acquire in a lifetime. Described as one of ‘those foreigners who handle English in a way to make a native Anglophile pale with jealousy’, Anthony Burgess once said of him, ‘he can teach the English how to write English’. The widow and her clever son were as close as siblings. After an adventurous escape to the American army in Salzburg – adventures providing much picaresque material for In Praise – he joined his mother in Budapest in 1946.

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The novel was praised by critics including Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. Burgess wrote in Punch that Vizinczey could "teach the English how to write English", praised the novel's "prose style and its sly apophthegms, as well as in the solidity of its characters, good and detestable alike." Burgess ended his review by saying: "I was entertained but also deeply moved: here is a novel set bang in the middle of our corrupt world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope." The London Literary Review called the novel "an authentic social epic, which reunites, after an estrangement of nearly a century, intellectual and moral edification with exuberant entertainment."