Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin Paper)
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Review
Never off our bestseller list, this radiant novel thoroughly deserves its place here. --London Review Bookshop
No one who has read it has failed to love it. -- What is so wonderful about the book is its tone and its grasp of character. (...) There is something almost divine about this -- and that Szerb's great intelligence didn't force him to produce a work of arid perfectionism makes it all the more remarkable. --NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
Journey by Moonlight is a burning book, a major book. GEORGE SZIRTES Times Literary Supplement -- Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century. PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph -- May Szerb's entry into our literary pantheon be definitive. ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times -- Despite the darkness of its themes and the European history that haunts it, Journey by Moonlight manages to be both comic and beautiful. MEGAN STEPHAN Daily Telegraph -- (A) most important document regarding the opinions and literary orientation of the author's generation. --MIKLOS SZABOLSCI History of Hungarian Literature (1964)
No one who has read it has failed to love it. -- What is so wonderful about the book is its tone and its grasp of character. (...) There is something almost divine about this -- and that Szerb's great intelligence didn't force him to produce a work of arid perfectionism makes it all the more remarkable. --NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
Journey by Moonlight is a burning book, a major book. GEORGE SZIRTES Times Literary Supplement -- Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century. PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph -- May Szerb's entry into our literary pantheon be definitive. ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times -- Despite the darkness of its themes and the European history that haunts it, Journey by Moonlight manages to be both comic and beautiful. MEGAN STEPHAN Daily Telegraph -- (A) most important document regarding the opinions and literary orientation of the author's generation. --MIKLOS SZABOLSCI History of Hungarian Literature (1964)
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
47 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is one of the most absorbing books I have read this year - there was no way I could put it down until I got to the end of it. Peopled with unforgettable characters like every one of us, this is a tale of love, death, individuality, courage, and conforming. The main characters are on a honeymoon trip in Rome, where they talk about their past lives and the people that affected them. There comes a point where the past and present meet, when it is not possible for love or life to continue; each character must make a choice to decide his or her own fate. The language is beautiful and the whole novel has eerie, Gothic undertones as we follow characters to their death, to isolated houses and mountains where they make an attempt to escape from a common, ordinary world. The language flows beautifully and makes you think about your own life as if you were being swept along by a stream of wisdom. This was wonderful, touching and self-reflective...highly recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A dark but compelling tale
Journey by Moonlight is considered by many to be the quintessential Hungarian novel; its central themes - preoccupation with death, nostalgia, the unsatisfactory life of the petty... Read more
Published 6 months ago by jacr100
Alain Fournier meets Mills & Boon
I read this book because it was chosen by my (all male) Book Group. Three of us loved it ('the best book we've ever read as a group'). One of us hated it. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Mr. S. Loveday
Perhaps an acquired taste?
Judging by all the 5 star reviews this book has received, I feel that I must be at fault for not fully appreciating it. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Dr. Philip Woods
fascinating book
this book was recommended to me by someone I trust, and was really surprised when I started reading it. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ms. Simone Plaut
a haunting novel of nostalgia for lost youth
This is a strange, at times surreal novel, whose hero Mihaly, now approaching middle age, is torn between a yearning for the freedom and excitement of his adolescence (represented... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Sarah A. Brown
What a find
In recent years I have been astonished and overjoyed to discover four magisterial European novelists - Sandor Marai, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Antal Szerb, all of whom should... Read more
Published on 14 Dec 2009 by GlynLuke
A gem, unusual and thoughtful.
I had never heard of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb until I came across this gem, beautifully translated by Len Rix. Read more
Published on 1 Mar 2009 by Suzie
A startling journey indeed
In Journey by Moonlight, the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb has produced one of the most memorable novels I have read for some time. Read more
Published on 5 Nov 2008 by A Common Reader
Wholly involving
Mihály, the central character of this elegant and stylish novel (beautifully translated by Len Rix) seems to belong to the early continental 19th century rather than to... Read more
Published on 4 Nov 2007 by Ralph Blumenau
a hidden classic..
Having just finished this masterpiece of a novel, I am truly surprised that I had not heard of it before seeing it in my local charity shop. Read more
Published on 19 Dec 2006 by T
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