“I wanted my sons to know where they came from,” Linda Leith remarked recently to The Monitor, NDG’s community newspaper. Because she was never able to talk to her father and find out who he really was, Leith, founder of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, wanted to write her story and offer it to her sons. It is a beautiful gift, one many people would like to receive from their own parents — but Leith’s gift, alas, isn’t for everybody.
Marrying Hungary is the story of a little girl who can’t put down roots, having moved from Belfast to London to Switzerland to Montreal, all before the age of fifteen – a little girl who will forever feel like a foreigner. It’s the story of an adolescent who learns, painfully, to free herself from her domineering father, a man afflicted with mental illness, a card-carrying Communist who throws Pernod in her face when she “talks back” and who brainwashes his children into speaking the Queen’s English to hide their Irishness. The story of an uncertain woman of the 1970s who lets her husband, a Hungarian émigré, make all the important decisions, and who never learns to speak her mind. A foreigner who finally finds her voice in Hungary, a country where she barely speaks the language.
Marrying Hungary is also a story of love that doesn’t conquer all.
As with any biography, different parts of Leith’s book appeal to different readers. A friend once told me that when he reads the biography of a writer, he usually skips the childhood altogether and dives right into the moment when the writer started focusing on the craft. Often, however, what makes them want to write, that desire “to write the stories [they] needed to read,” occurs in childhood.
However, important as Leith’s childhood is, Marrying Hungary is difficult to get into at first, describing more-or-less interesting events through the fragmented memory of a small child. The book only starts grabbing the reader’s attention when Leith moves to Montreal. Fascinating are her thoughts on why she felt compelled to write, and most writers will probably feel kinship when she reveals how her perception of life was warped by the books she read. However, much as I enjoyed reading about her life in London and Budapest, I wasn’t interested in motherhood or family life in Pointe-Claire. My interest waxed and waned so often that, in the end, everything seemed to have evened out and I was left feeling lukewarm.
Unfortunately, the book is riddled with typos and awkward sentences (“You could have held a meeting in a telephone kiosk of Communist Party members in Northern Ireland in the early 1950s, and my parents knew all of them”). Whether the writer, the editor or the Queen’s English is to blame, I don’t know, but their presence is distracting.
Despite these flaws, Marrying Hungary makes me curious enough about what makes Leith tick as a writer, and what inspired her, to encourage me to read her novels.
Mélanie Grondin is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in carte blanche, Soliloquies, Headlight and Room Magazine. Her short story Law of Attraction will appear in the upcoming issue of Nashwaak Review. She was dreading winter long before it even began.
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To the Editor
I do not normally respond to reviews, but the quality of this one inspires me to comment.
I note that Ms Grondin is uninterested in family life, which is her prerogative. It might not have been an inspired idea for such a person to review a book entitled Marrying Hungary by the mother of three sons. That is the prerogative of her editor, as is publishing a review that considers such an interest to be a flaw.
Even more questionable is that a single, well-constructed sentence is cited to support the sweeping comment that Marrying Hungary “is riddled with typos and awkward sentences.” I realize that the sentence in question is a compound sentence, which was evidently distracting. Given that you have chosen to publish the review, and presumably stand by it, I would be grateful if you would kindly explain what is wrong with it.
Linda Leith
Montreal
I’m not the person to whom the above letter is addressed – that would be our literary editor. But it raises questions that concern me as Rover’s founder.
When I first read the review on line, I made a mental note to get a copy of Marrying Hungary. The stuff about père Leith sounds fascinating – a tantalizing promise of insight into the personality of Anglo-Montreal’s most powerful literary personnage.
Re-reading, I notice Melanie has couched her reservations as personal opinions, a gentle way of qualifying negativity but one which leaves her wide open. A more cunning (more experienced?) writer would have adopted the Moses voice, made a few clean cuts and concentrated on amusing the reader, without worrying about the writer’s feelings.
But I wonder how far a publication dedicated to nurturing a new generation of critics should go in promoting a school of criticism? Surely a fresh response is as good as a clever one. And surely we shouldn’t crush reviews just because they aren’t wildly positive.
Book people often complain about the shrinking space for reviews in print publications. They also claim print reviews don’t matter anymore, that a rave or pan in the Globe has little impact on sales. Most reviews are bland; few critics dare to take a stand.
Perhaps not surprisingly, reviews of local books have turned out to be Rover’s sharpest bite. That’s a good sign. Passion in any form is to be cherished, though it’s a little disconcerting to find out some Montreal writers are so thin-skinned. They’re used to the gentle MRB (a government funded literary mag run by the publishers’ association), and the kindly Gazette – a publication so thoroughly immune to criticism from the outside that it has lost the stomach for dishing it out.
Anyone in search of trenchant literary criticism of Anglo-Quebec writing should eavesdrop in the corridors of Blue Met. That’s where local writers meet and chat honestly about who they’ve read.
Meanwhile, please don’t take Rover personally. In due time, honesty and eagerness will gel. New voices will emerge and mature, and we’ll all be better for it. At least that is my hope.