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.
Journey by Moonlight
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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)
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.
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51 of 54 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.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
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.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Judging by all the 5 star reviews this book has received, I feel that I must be at fault for not fully appreciating it. Perhaps you need to have more sympathy for the Hungarian bourgeois mentalities it is built around: romanticism, fascination with death/suicide, and the love/hate relationship with the predictability of bourgeois life. I loved the start, the idea of a honeymoon in romantic Venice threatened by the groom's yearning for going off the beaten track on his own in a random search for something lost from the friendships of his youth. But after that the novel, although readable and interesting enough (particularly the Italian locations), could not really hold my attention. The hero is too lacking in direction (swayed this way and that by events and people) to be attractive, and the plot has too many bizarre coincidences to convince. Still worth reading as a modern Hungarian classic.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mihaly as a character shouldn't inspire our sympathy, and yet you'll...
"ON THE TRAIN everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back alleys." This is our introduction to Mihaly a Hungarian businessman on his honeymoon in Venice. Read more
Published 2 months ago by PL
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful book
Szerb is one of teh reat mittel europena authors of teh 20 th century and this onw is fine although he has an excellent collection of works
Published 3 months ago by Catherine
4.0 out of 5 stars
it was a good book, well written
As always it is very personal with books and films and it depends on your mood too at the time of reading it. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Cinz
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bohemian life defaults to traditional structures
A great read. Antal Szerb shows how all wild, wandering, confused, diverse Bohemian lifestyles inevitably collapse back to boring reliable traditional structures. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Geoff Crocker
4.0 out of 5 stars
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 18 months ago by jacr100
1.0 out of 5 stars
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 23 months ago by Mr. S. Loveday
5.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating book
this book was recommended to me by someone I trust, and was really surprised when I started reading it. Read more
Published on 25 Sep 2010 by Ms. Simone Plaut
5.0 out of 5 stars
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 on 22 Aug 2010 by Sarah A. Brown
5.0 out of 5 stars
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
5.0 out of 5 stars
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
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