Credits

At the beginning of 1975, Stephen Vizinczey wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “If we want to know how the world hangs together, we must read Pushkin, Gogol, Kleist, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy; if we want to know how the world falls apart, we must read Dostoevsky...” At the beginning of 1996 - after re-reading In Praise of Older Women, An Innocent Millionaire, Truth and Lies in Literature (all published in Mexico by Grijalbo) – the re-reader of these living books acquired this certainty: “If we want to know how the world hangs together, and how it falls apart, we must read this indispensable Hungarian writer Stephen Vizinczey.”

At the end of August 1995, some words of Vizinczey’s in relation to his most recent novel, The Man with the Magic Touch, reached the readers of etcétera. Today - through 12 pages which were dated in England but arrived in an envelope posted from Spain - Stephen talked about An Innocent Millionaire, his second novel, by which Anthony Burgess was “entertained but also deeply moved: here is a novel set bang in the middle of our decadent, polluted, corrupt world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope.”

Gloria Vizinczey, in London, translated the questions from Spanish into English. Alfredo Espino, in Mexico City, translated Stephen’s answers from English into Spanish. For their generousity, all thanks are due to her and to him.