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    Journey by Moonlight
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    Journey by Moonlight
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    Journey by Moonlight
    Ebook309 pages4 hours

    Journey by Moonlight

    By Antal Szerb

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "No one who has read it has failed to love it." - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian. "Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century." - Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph. 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 choose.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2002
    ISBN9781906548506
    Author

    Antal Szerb

    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, 1934, is set in London and Wales. Journey by MoonlightThe Queen's Necklace and various volumes of novellas. He died in the forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945.

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    Reviews for Journey by Moonlight

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      A stunningly original novel of interpersonal relationships that explores themes such as spirituality and death. Heavy going? On the contrary, it's quite a page-turner, as the action moves through Northern and Central Italy (during Fascism) and then to Paris. Szerb's style is elegant and his characters are convincing. I enjoyed this immensely.
    • 5/5
      casual unfolding of story with some scepticism, symbolism, and irony, a symmetrical plot of Mihaly and Erzsi with missteps along the way concluding in a satisfactory manner.
    • 4/5
      Very European, very existential and very good. Antal Szerb's [Journey by Moonlight] was published in Hungarian in 1937 and this edition was translated by Len Rix in 2001. Rix himself describes the actions of Mihaly; the central character as immoral, absurd and farcical, but I find his actions those of a sane man in world of absurdity. (but that probably says more about me than it does the book). We can never know exactly what Szerb thought because much of what he writes seems ironical and ambiguous. Don't let this put you off reading because the book is not 'difficult' even if you cannot come to terms with Mihaly and his perceived weakness of character.I love books with a good opening sentence and this one has a killer:"On the train everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back alleys. Mihaly and Erzsi are on honeymoon in Venice (a warning for anyone considering honeymooning in Venice) and Mihaly is already feeling trapped. He takes himself off for a walk and fails to return to the hotel until the following morning. He tries to explain to Erzsi his actions and tells her of his adolescence when he came under the spell of Eva and her brother Tamas. He spent much of his time with this curious couple who were obsessed with death and the act of dying. There were others in this circle of friends; Ervin a Jew who converted to Catholicism and Janos Szepetnecki a youth already involved in criminal activity. It is a visit from Szeptnecki that jolts Mihaly out of his comfortable marriage with the wealthy Erszi and sends him on a quest to discover himself. In typical Mihaly fashion he gets off a train to buy some coffee, getting back on to the wrong train effectively separating himself from his newly married wife. He embarks on a ramble around Italy relying on fate to show him the way.Tamas we learn has committed suicide, but Eva, Janos and Ervin are all in Italy and Mihaly stumbles upon them as he vaguely tries to sort out some sort of meaning for his existence. Death and/or suicide seems to hover tantalisingly close and I was reminded of Albert Camus opening paragraph in his [Myth of Sisyphus] There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Antal Szerb's lightness of touch, his sense of fun and his use of irony serve to keep his book from plunging the reader into some sort of turgid tragedy. We are able to be amused by Mihaly and at the same time be interested and wonder at his lack of perspicacity. Zoltan: Erzsi's ex husband writes to Mihaly telling him to sort himself out, to make up his mind about Erzsi and says:if I were a woman and had to choose between the two of us I would choose you without hesitation and Erzsi surely loves you for being the sort of person you are; - so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything, like someone from another planet, a Martian on Earth, someone who never really notices anything, who cannot feel real anger about anything, who never pays proper attention when others speak, who often seems to act out of vague goodwill and politeness as if just playing at being human. It is not too difficult to understand why Mihaly is such an outsider to the world of business and affairs that Zoltan inhabits, but it is also not so difficult to see why Erzsi is so attracted to him. Later Erzsi tells him that "The world won't tolerate a man giving himself up to nostalgia, it wont tolerate any deviations from the norm. Any desertion or defiance and sooner or later it turns the Zoltans on you."Antal Szerb intrigues with some fine writing, with some ambiguous discussions on the meaning of life, but also he has a good story to tell. He takes us on a tour of Italy, he wallows in Mihaly's nostalgia, there are ghosts and images from the past and meetings with old friends. There is also on the fringe of this world; the fascists who hover in the background; Mussolini is in power and from our perspective we know that Mihaly's world will be subject to violent change. Antal Szerb is not unsympathetic to his female characters, they are strong and resolute and we are allowed to see the world through Erzsi's eyes. I enjoyed this book very much, it nearly persuaded me to jump in the car and go to see those Italian towns, but then like Mihaly I am a man of inaction and that is why perhaps I liked the book so much. A four star read.
    • 4/5
      An excellent tale with numerous threads; accepting societal norms, the power of the past, the lure of religion, death, and drama. It is all written with an understanding of psychology and the support of atmospheric scenes.
    • 5/5
      An 1st rate book from an author I hadn't previously heard of. It has an excellent reputation and great reviews from reliable critics, entirely deserved. It has haunted me since I read it, and has given me a lot to think about for a long time. I will try and read more by the author, who apparently taught at the university of Szeged.
    • 3/5
      Bought for my birthday by my brother who now lives on the Continent and is exploring more writer from central Europe. I was at times pulled in by the main character and at others shouting at him in my head, calling him a whinging idiot. Szerb is a sharp observer of the human condition and by the end I felt the resolution worked.
    • 4/5
      Hungarian couple on honeymoon in Italy, as the husband describes his adolescent friends to his new wife they start to reappear in his life and lead him astray (again). Weird, wonderful, needs a second reading.
    • 2/5
      After a while I found this book tedious. The situations were so completely different to today and the characters so old fashioned that I could not continue. It didn't even give me much insight into the era.
    • 4/5
      Journey by moonlight sometimes reads like Where angels fear to tread as rewritten by someone brought up in the spirit of German romanticism. Mihály is an emotionally-troubled young man who after years of drifting has tried to anchor himself in the bourgeois "real world" by marrying Erszi. Unfortunately, she has married him largely for the opposite reason: she is looking for a Tyger to drag her away from boring respectability. So it's perhaps not such a surprise that when, a week or so into their Italian honeymoon, Mihály accidentally gets on the wrong train and loses touch with his new bride, he doesn't make any great effort to find her again. Mihály is still carrying around a lot of emotional baggage from his claustrophobic teenage friendships with a group of avant-la-lettre goths, addicted to role-playing games and death-imagery. In the meantime one of them has taken his own life (or possibly been murdered), another has become a Franciscan friar, another has adopted the persona of a wheeler-dealer crook, and only Éva, the girl they were all (including her brother) in love with, seems to have turned out halfway normal. Lots of glorious Italian tourist-trail atmosphere, hardly spoilt by the posters of Mussolini on every wall, lots of romantic longing and fantasising about death, but all set off against common-sense reality with a delightfully ironic detachment. As in Forster, the Italian zest for life is set up in opposition to northern melancholy and over-analytical thinking, but unlike Forster he's clear that work and business belong on the "life" side of the scales, together with sex and pasta, whilst art and love and (mystical-)religion are classified with the other death-wish items.
    • 5/5
      A work of nuanced psychological acumen and a great example of pre-WWII continental literature.
    • 4/5
      So human. It is a messy affair, a poet and failed conformist chooses escape to avoid bourgeois suffocation. I felt the novel was tender and illuminating.
    • 4/5
      Mihály is on his honeymoon in Italy, when he becomes overwhelmed with nostalgia for his childhood, especially his friendship with Éva and Tamás Ulpius. The Ulpius household was very unusual, in part because they eschewed the bourgeois upbringing of Mihály's middle-class family. But his relationship with the Ulpius children was also unusual in that they played with the notion of death as the ultimate form of love and loyalty. Mihály is now obsessed with the questions of whether he "sold out" when he became an office worker and "married well", and with the fate of his friends, one of whom died in mysterious circumstances. As Mihály becomes more and more fixated on mortality, his life in the mortal world becomes disorganized, and he wanders pilgrim-like, not is search of God or truth, but death. Despite the darkness of the novel's plot, it's not a dreary read. Szerb is in turns humorous, ironic, and acerbic. His writing is both entertaining and thought-provoking. He frequently alludes to Dante and the Divine Comedy, but his novel turns the plot on it's head: the first chapter is "Honeymoon" and the last is "At Hell's Gate." There is a manipulative and death-loving Beatrice; and a con artist and petty thief who plays the role of Virgil. I'm sure a grad student could have a lot of fun picking this theme apart. As for me, I look forward to reading another novel by Szerb; Rebbecanyc had particularly recommended The Pendragon Legend.
    • 4/5
      On honeymoon in Italy, Mihály chooses a solitary nocturnal ramble in the back alleys of Venice over the pleasures of the bridal bed. It doesn’t take a psychology guru to realise that the marriage is not off to the best of starts. His wife Erszi knows that, this being her dreamy and eccentric Mihály (rather than her practical first husband Zoltán), the explanation for his erratic behaviour is most likely complex and slightly illogical. And that’s exactly what it turns out to be. In fact after a (not so) chance encounter with an old acquaintance - János Szepetneki – Mihály decides to recount to Erszi his obsessive youthful friendship with siblings Tamás and Éva Ulpius, to whose “ring” he belonged together with said János and the ascetic Ervin. Oiled by a bottle of Italian wine, and egged on by Erszi’s insistent questions, Mihály implicitly reveals (despite his protestation to the contrary) that his relationship with Tamás and Éva had strong erotic overtones and that this might have something to do with his strange and evident discomfiture with the marital state. What is certainly clear is that Tamás’s eventual tragic death left a long-term mark on the close coterie of friends.This long “psychoanalytic” session reminded me of a very different novel – Murakami’s "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" . And, like Murakami’s, this novel does develop into a “pilgrimage” of sorts - its first part ends with Mihály, not altogether innocently, contriving to catch a wrong train and separating himself from Erszi. In the subsequent parts of the book, we follow Mihály as, against the backdrop of an Italy exotic, magical, seductive and frightening, he tries to recapture the decadent aura of his youth.Antal Szerb’s 1937 “Journey by Moonlight” (or, to give its title in its literal translation, “Traveller and the Moonlight”) is one of the best-known of modern Hungarian novels. It certainly deserves to be much better appreciated outside Szerb’s native country. Like all great classics, it is a multilayered work which lends itself to a variety of readings. It is, in its own weird way, a comedy of manners, a streak of playfully sardonic humour always bubbling just beneath the surface. It is also novel of “magical realism” written before the term was invented. It is an exploration of pre-World War II society – indeed, at its most obvious and superficial level, it presents us with a cast of characters who are all trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the bourgeoisie they find so suffocating. But, as translator Peter Czipott points out in the insightful afterword to this Alma Classics edition, a major theme in the novel is Szerb’s exploration of “nostalgia”. What Mihály is after are the dreams and ideals of his youth, now sadly replaced by humdrum, everyday life. But is it at all possible to go back in time? At one point towards the end, one character warns another not to try to live “someone else’s life”. But, the novel seems to be telling us, our youthful selves are as distant from us as “someone else”.Szerb was not primarily a novelist, but a literary scholar, who published respected works on the history of Hungarian and world literature. He lived for a time in Italy – his descriptions of the country are partly autobiographical but, in a quasi-postmodern twist, they also (knowingly) reflect common literary portrayals of the Bel Paese which Szerb knew so well through his studies. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that this is not the Italy of the Italians, or even that of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. This is, by turns, the darkly fascinating and haunting Italy of the Continental Gothic novels, the decadent Italy of fin-de-siecle writers (Mann’s Death in Venice comes to mind), Goethe’s sun-washed Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...Journey by Moonlight might not always be an easy read, but it certainly is one which repays the effort and which is likely to reveal new depths if revisited. This Alma Classics edition is highly recommended, not only for its fluent translation, but also for its useful explanatory notes.
    • 5/5
      The first story is about a famous classics professor named senator La Ciura, who, despite the fact that he is an irascible curmudgeon, befriends a young newspaper reporter. They find that they are both Sicilian and thus begins a friendship between this unlikely pair. After they have forged this friendship, the senator goes on a trip to Spain but before he sets sail, he tells the reporter about an important experience he had when he was 24 that had a profound impact on his life. The tale the senator tells is passionate and descriptive and has a delightfully unexpected twist. The second story tells the heartwarming tale of a modest accountant on his way home from the office with the bonus he received from his company for Christmas. The final story is about Don Bastassano, a man who is obsessed with acquiring lands on the island of Sicily. He keeps a detailed map of all these lands which had been acquired through less than scrupulous means. He becomes the subject of gossip among the other nobles who like to speculate about the don’s amount of wealth, property and his personal habits.This is a flawless translation of three delightful Italian short stories. Once again the New York Review of books has triumphantly provided us with another must-read classic.
    • 4/5
      This beautifully written, highly atmospheric and evocative book has a rather passive, annoying main character so in the end I didn’t love it as much as Szerb’s Oliver VII, a perfectly light, airy and ironic fable about a king who stages his own coup and ends up disguised as himself. Mihaly and his new wife Erzsi are on their honeymoon in Italy. It is clear early on that everything is not well – Mihaly has subconscious urges to run off and finally lets Erzsi in on his unresolved issues. They stem from his conflicts with his childhood clique – the siblings, Eva and Tamas, who killed himself under mysterious circumstances, passionately intelligent Ervin, who disappeared, and sardonic and competitive Janos who they encounter in Italy. After a chance accident, Mihaly and Erzsi are separated and Mihaly decides to take the opportunity to look for his friends though he does it in a passive way, relying on fate. Erzsi leaves for Paris and has new adventures and encounters with some of Mihaly’s friends there.The best part of the book was Szerb’s evocative writing. He creates a memorable portrait of the isolated, intense existence of Mihaly’s group – they were obsessed with death, religion and separation from a conventional life. There are also nicely atmospheric descriptions of the various Italian cities that Mihaly travels to as well as cosmopolitan Paris. Even with all the death and decay, Szerb maintains a light touch in other scenes – Mihaly’s relationship with an earnest American art student and a British doctor, Erzsi’s puzzling of the men in her life in Paris. A kind of mystery lurks under both Mihaly and Erzsi’s experiences. An early nausea and feeling of being sucked into a whirlpool led to Mihaly’s friendship with Eva and Tamas. This recurs at some points in the novel. Fate also follows Mihaly around and facilitates his meetings with his old friends. There are stories of ghosts and suicides and disappearances. Sometimes both Mihaly and Erzsi wonder if everyone in their lives is playacting except for them.Mihaly and Erzsi married each other for seemingly opposite reasons – Erzsi wanted something other than her first conventional marriage and tried to find it in the odd and dreamy Mihaly while he wanted to want a bourgeois existence with Erzsi. Mihaly’s search in Italy is predictably fueled by his long-standing obsession with Eva. He can be rather annoying in his denial of feelings and passivity – after telling Erzsi the story of his past, she questions his feelings for Eva and he is adamant that he never loved her which is clearly untrue. He also just lets experiences happen to him and sponges off his family and others that he meets. Szerb has a tidy, bittersweet but not unhappy ending where Mihaly and Erzsi both get what they think they want – Eva and a death wish or an exciting break from conventional relationships – but the situations are defused in a slightly ridiculous fashion. Very well-done.