Synopses & Reviews
"Gathered here is a selection of the essays [of] the distinguished Hungarian born novelist Stephen Vizinczey. . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu,
The Times (London)
"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly
"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek
"Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader
Table of Contents
Introduction by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson
Acknowledgments
Prologue
A Writer's Ten Commandments
France
Why Eng. Lit. Is Not Enough
Putting Rousseau Down
One of the Very Few
Stendhal's Torch of Genius
The Unfinished Masterpiece
Loving Bids for Freedom
Last Word on the Media
The Man Who Told Us About Going Mad
Voice from the Fringe of Madness
A Horse at the Opera
Good Faith and Bad
A Passion for the Impersonal
Cruelty and Death
Europe's Inner Demons
Wolves Dressed in Papal Robes
Mind of a Mass Murderer
The Latest Pseudo-Science
Cannibals and Christians
Level Look at Death
Honour, Mafia Style
The Brave Men Who Fight the Mafia
Germany
The Power of Pretentiousness
The Letters of Thomas Mann
The Genius Whose Time Has Come
Extracts from Kleist
Who Killed Kleist?
Sex, Society, Politics
The Lessons of Robert Kennedy
Condemned World, Literary Kingdom
What Generation Gap?
A True Heroine
A Tangle of Anarchists
Demolition Job on Male Myths and Bogus Social Science
Fearless Absurdities
An Anthropologist Observes the Ik
Russia
Seeing Through Human Muddle
Grand Master of Despair
The Tolstoy Tree
Where Are Pasternak's Royalties?
How Brainwashing Succeeds
Chronicles of Blood
What Matters Most
Leonardo's Regret
The Proudest Genius of this Realm
The Greatest of Friends
Rules of the Game
Equivocal Hero
The Wisest Art
The American Vice President Who Claimed to Be a British Subject
Truth and Lies in Literature
Christianity, Communism and Poetry
A Revolutionary in Cuernavaca
The Bishop of Platitudes
The Cardinal's Conscience
Double Suicide
The Way to Disaster
Hungarian Life-lines
Commentary on a Poem