DIARIO 16, 15 Feb 90

WINDOWS

By Jesus Morenzo Sanz

This book, resounding like an impassioned speech in favor of clarity, liberty and the enjoyment of life, not exempt from the tragic burden of destiny, is constructed from a prologue, 'A Writer's Ten Commandments', which is a programmatic declaration of the dissolving acid that Vizinezey sprinkles over the vain complacencies of literature, and seven thematic sections (France; Cruelty and Death; Germany; Sex, Science, politics; Russia; What Matters Most; Christianity, Communism, Poetry) which are like windows opened on our ignorance, impotence and tribulation, letting in crystalline light and pure air.

The author of In Praise of Older Women and An Innocent Millionaire collects here 52 newspaper articles, essays and book reviews, all of them free from the diplomacy of those critics who, as Vizinezey says, write as if they were talking out of both sides of their mouth, and which turn this book into a passionate protest against stupidity, deceit and literary squalor. Stimulating in his loves as well as his hates, Vizinczey's hypercritical and plainspoken writing will undoubtedly help more than one reader (and more than one writer) to be less pedantic and pretentious, to become wiser and more lucid, and also, perhaps, more courageous. For Vizinczey's ardent attempt to free life from its lies with writing (like the great ones be admires - Shakespeare, Swift, Rousseau, Sterne, Stendhal, Baizac, Kleist, Tolstoy, Nerval) cannot fail to communicate his force, the coherence of his passion which is precisely that constant tension towards what he calls truth and authenticity, a tension necessarily founded on the polar opposites of love and hate, scorn and pity. Because any other type of consistency which does not assume these tensions and distances between reasoning and the emotions would be either a sham or - as Vizinezey says - 'a virtue for trains'. Erudite and a 4eclared rationalist, Vizinczey is interested (and this is also an attempt to sum up the two authors he admires most, Stendhal and Kleist) in undermining all the domains of 'irrationality' and bringing to light the reasons why human beings are tossed to and fro between love, politics and crime.

His -incorruptible gaze scans equally vain illusions buoyed up with hope (that 'universal cant') and the calumnies of those who vituperate against the scheme of things. Vizinczey refutes the liars who slander life in the name of literature and submit it to the rules .of impotence and the negation of human dignity, because 'In real life there is no power which could inescapably prevail over our vitality and love'. For Vizinczey there are two kinds of literature: one helps you to understand, the other helps you to forget; the first helps you to be a free person and a free citizen, that other helps people to manipulate you. Included in this category are flattery, illusions, white lies, pretences and self-deception. Vizinczey attacks this literature, as he attacks its complicity with the politics that breed degradation and crime. And as he attacks the critics who are summed up in that figure already portrayed by Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve, the 'authoritative critic' who 'praises the false, the innocuous., the pretentious, damning everything that is truthful, lively, passionate, unruly - anything that might move us deeply and stir us to think'. Because if we change, the world might change too.

In short, this book is an intellectually exciting and morally inspiring text concerning those 'little true facts' about the problems in which, through the course of time and in the world of the present, literature interlocks with politics, religion, sex, personal identity and group identities. (The excellent last chapter is about the permanent revolution in Hungary.) A true book, full of the 'calamities that haven't yet destroyed us, but which, on the contrary, stated and reported with clarity, turn words into the lances of a permanent living cavalry charge (sometimes a desperate one, considering .ts defeats) in defense of the joy and dignity of existence. Unsubmissive writing which challenges the idea we have of ourselves and which, based on the denunciation of any kind of literary opportunism, offers certain safe-conducts against despair.

By Jesus Morenzo Sanz