Stephen Vizinczey - In Praise of Older Women

In Praise of Older Women

In Praise of Older Women: the amorous recollections of András Vajda is a bildungsroman whose young narrator has sexual encounters with women in their thirties and forties in Hungary, Italy, and Canada. "The book is dedicated to older women and is addressed to young men--and the connection between the two is my proposition" is the book's epigraph. Kildare Dobbs wrote in Saturday Night, "Here is this Hungarian rebel who in 1957 could scarcely speak a word of our language and who even today speaks it with an impenetrable accent and whose name moreover we can't pronounce, and he has the gall to place himself, with his first book and in his thirty-third year, among the masters of plain English prose..."

In 2001 it was translated for the first time into French, and became a best-seller in France. It has twice been made into a movie: a 1978 Canadian production starring Tom Berenger as Andras Vayda, and a subsequent 1997 Spanish production featuring Faye Dunaway as Condesa.