The most intriguing, and also troubling, word in the title of Anna Porter's book is "lies". The Hungarian-born Canadian writer's novelistic family history is above all a tribute to her grandfather Vili (short for Vilmos, i.e., William) Rácz, who taught her the importance of family, class and history, and endowed her with a strong Hungarian identity which has not faded with the passing years, even though she left her native country over fifty years ago, at age thirteen. The figure of the grandfather and the stories he told her have clearly contributed to her desire to become a writer.
Vilmos Rácz was a Hungarian gentleman of the old school, fiercely proud of his noble lineage. A one-time Olympic athlete, a former publisher of theatre magazines and author of the definitive duelists' handbook, he was also a bon vivant, an incorrigible womanizer and man about town who ended his life in New Zealand, of all places, where he managed to become a champion bowler. To Anna, the child, he was indeed a larger-than-life figure, wise, colourful, altogether extraordinary, a man who at the drop of a hat could dip into his treasure trove of endlessly fascinating stories. Is Vili, then, the swashbuckling storyteller and fabulist the author and her publisher prepare us for? Are the lies, and the secrets, and the magic, all his? Actually, the Vili Rácz of the book is rather more ordinary. And the more one knows about the world he lived in, the more ordinary and typical he seems. But even if one doesn't know that world, the promised magnetism and charisma doesn't come through. Maybe the problem is not with Vili's seductive character but with the author's ability to conjure it up.

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Ivan Sanders
is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's East Central European Center. He has translated several major Hungarian contemporary writers, including Milán Füst, György Konrád and Péter Nádas, into English.