Toby Lichtig, The Times Literary SupplementĪ writer of immense subtlety and generosity.Can literary mastery be this quiet-seeming, this hilarious, this kind? Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers. Its intelligence is so humane-so forgiving to the last.And from the wreckage of the Holocaust, from such horrible annihilation, from such a violent silencing of so many voices, this extraordinary novel emerges as another improbable survival.Ī devastatingly intelligent novel of love, society and metaphysics in a mid-1930s Europe.As a study of erotic caprice, Journey by Moonlight is brilliant, but it is so much more than just a romp. Journey by Moonlight is a beautiful book, the sort of book that stays imprinted on some soft part of you for a long time. by Antal Szerb, introduction by Julie Orringer, translated by Len Rix Journey by Moonlight was the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for October 2014.

In the words of the critic Nicholas Lezard, “No one who has read it has failed to love it.” Off he goes across Italy, wandering from city to city, haunted and accosted by a strange array of figures from the troubled youth that he thought he had left behind: There are the charismatic siblings, Éva and Tamás, whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind Ervin, a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for Éva’s love and again, that ruffian on the motorcycle.Īntal Szerb’s dreamlike adventure, like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, is an intoxicating, utterly individual mix of magic, madness, eros, and menace. The trouble comes to a head when Mihály misses the train he and Erzsi are due to take to Rome. It’s János, someone Mihály hasn’t seen for years, and he wants Mihály to come with him in search of Ervin, their childhood friend. The trouble picks up in Ravenna, where a hostile man zooms up on a motorcycle as the couple are sitting at an outdoor café.

Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s honeymoon tour of Italy.

Szerb antal journey by moonlight