The Storyteller: A Memoir of Secrets, Magic, and Lies

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Here is the story of Anna Porter, born in Budapest in the 1940s, with
the Germans on the streets and British and Americans dropping bombs
overhead, and her turbulent life until she left Hungary after the 1956
Revolution and ended up in Canada to become head of Key Porter Books.
Here are stories of the author’s family, their many marriages,
liaisons, and compromises with varying political regimes. But here,
above all, are the stories of Hungary, its history and its legends, as
told to Anna by her grandfather, Vili Rбcz. This grand storyteller was
a publisher of theatre and movie magazines, an Olympic athlete, a
magician, a dueller, a womanizer, a man of many talents who filled
Anna’s childhood with his stories and his fables and always told her
she should get an education.

The childish and sensible questions from the young Anna as Vili spins
his yarns keep the narrative moving at a clip, but a glossary of names
would have been helpful. Yet this is how a child absorbs history, as a
jumble of people and events and stories, of magic and mystery and
horror. For the adult reader, it is a kaleidoscopic look at Hungary’s
stories as Vili entertains and instructs his small granddaughter. In
telling of the closure of his publishing office, he explains to the
child that stories threaten dictators because they make us think about
“who we are and who we might become.” In this book, she now passes
along the stories, with her own perception and humour.

When Anna’s mother, Puci, who later trained to be a road surveyor,
decided to travel to Austria to find the husband who had left when Anna
was born, she and Anna were arrested. In prison, Puci told stories to
help Anna fall asleep. Many years later, when Anna returned to Hungary
with one of her own daughters, it was she who had become the
storyteller.