Product Description

Anxious to please his bourgeois father, Mihaly has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their honeymoon in Italy, Mihaly 'loses' his bride at a provincial station and embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that leads him finally to Rome. There all the death-haunted and erotic elements of his past converge, and he, like Erzsi, has finally to make a choice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10050 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: Hungarian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century. --PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph

May Szerb's re-entry into our literary pantheon be definitive. --ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times

About the Author
Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of Jewish descent. Graduating in German and English, he rapidly established himself as a prolific scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry, studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. His first novel, The Pendragon Legend, was writtenin 1934. Journey by Moonlight appeared in 1937, followed in 1943 by The Queen's Necklace and various volumes of novellas. He died in a forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945.

Customer Reviews

a marvelous, muse-ridden oddysey
Journey by Moonlight is deservedly a classic of 20th century Hungarian literature and a very great novel. It combines realistic depiction of middle class Budapest manners and mores with a profound sense of the darker forces at work in all of us beneath the veneer of civilisation (forces which were to erupt and deprive the author of his life in a Nazi labour camp a few years after he published this book). Every character is drawn with superb elegance and depth, and the parallel journeys of Mihaly and Erszi are astonishing in their desperate intensity and danger. I lived every second of their pathetic nights of crisis with them and was genuinely relieved by the ironic conclusion.

This book is far more than an accomplished comedy of manners, though it may be read as simply that. Its complex nesting of love-triangles denotes the presence of the muse in, ultimately, nightmarish mode. I believe it is a model and precursor for Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, mention of which immediately calls attention to this work's superior quality as literature and imagination. Antal Szerb deserves our love and gratitude for depicting civilisation and its discontents with a loving mockery counterbalanced by a clear sense of the darkness and menace implicit in civilisation's overthrow (or latent in its roots). He knew so much and spoke so well, we are fortunate to have inherited this much of his genius.

A beauty on love, wisdom and men coming to age
Though Szerb may not be the best known Hungarian author in the Western part of the world, he was a genius of rare literal quality. This book is not a great novel, but it tells so much about the country and its occupants during the last years of a forever vanished era. His prose is really elegant which carries you through the not too complicated story about a young man looking for himself - and love -, for the meaning of life (which, as it turns out doesn't exist), and for the rightness of love and being loved. It's an easy read - but on the surface. If you dig deeper and don't give in his charming prose, you will find yourself in the middle of a journey all of us has to take. Not a pleasant trip, but the eternal sadness is washed away by clever thoughts and his ability to see and to make you see the brighter side of this journey. Quiet sadness wrapped in charm with wit about life on earth. He echoes thoughts we all have considered and dares to say it aloud. It's not original: you will find no new information about life and its associates, but he at least tells you something. You are not alone. Not a beach book, but a great friend for brown and lightless nights.

Sex or Suicide?
You can see from the first page that Mihaly is not comfortable with the idea of a honeymoon. A trip that is meant to finally draw a line under the extreme and intimate relationships and obsessions of his adolescence only plunges him more deeply into an irrational and self-destructive nostalalgia for the world within a world inhabited by his friends Tamas, Ervin, Janos and most of all the dangerous and captivating Eva. Szerb allows us into the Mihaly's deepest thoughts as he seems to recapture and then abandon the memories of his first love on a roadtrip around the backwaters and tourist traps Mussolini's Italy.

He tries to weigh up his choices of soul and suicide or sex and security. There are times when the reader probably wants to just slap Mihaly and tell him to grow up but you secretly hope that somehow he can rediscover the naivity and  purity of his youth, or at least find a more bohemian alternative than returning to work for his father in the Varaljai Hemp and Flax Works. It is funny, fascinating and frustrating in turn. Szerb has written a Hungarian take on Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles', with more sex, more grounding in the economics of middle-class middle Europe and with less iron, but more irony.