Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics)

Product Description An NYRB Classics OriginalThe trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihlys honeymoon tour of Italy. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble picks up in Ravenna, where a hostile man zooms up on a motorcycle as the couple are sitting at an outdoor caf. Its Jnos, someone Mihly hasnt seen for years, and he wants Mihly to come with him in search of Ervin, their childhood friend. The trouble comes to a head when Mihly misses the train he and Erzsi are due to take to Rome. 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, va and Tams, whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind; Ervin, a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for vas love; and again, that ruffian on the motorcycle.Antal Szerbs dreamlike adventure, like BulgakovsThe Master and Margarita, is an intoxicating, utterly individual mix of magic, madness, eros, and menace. In the words of the critic Nicholas Lezard, No one who has read it has failed to love it. Review Journey by Moonlight is a beautiful book, the sort of book that stays imprinted on some soft part of you for a long time. 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. -Becca Rothfeld,The New RepublicA 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. -Toby Lichtig,The Times Literary SupplementA 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. -Ali SmithJust divine...I cant remember the last time I did this: finished a novel, and then turned straight back to page 1 to start it over again. That is, until I readJourney by Moonlight...Its a comedy, but a serious and slyly clever one, the kind of book that makes you imagine the author has had private access to your own soul...Len Rix [has] managed to translate Szerbs book into beautifully fluent English, and what we have is a work of comedy and depth, the comedy all the more striking in that the chief subjects of the book are abnegation and suicide...No one who has read it has failed to love it. -Nicholas Lezard,The Guardian A novel to love as well as admire, always playful and ironical, full of brilliant descriptions, bon mots and absurd situations...its a book utterly in love with life. -Kevin Crossley-Holland,The Guardian, Books of the Year This radiantly funny and intelligent novel...shows its author to be one of the masters of twentieth-century fiction. Len Rixs loving translation of a book that might have remained lost to us deserves special praise. -Paul Bailey,The Times Literary Supplement, International Books of the Year Szerbs first novel exulted in the absurdity of life while his last despaired over it. His most well-known work,Journey by Moonlight, written in 1937, maintained a powerful tension between both...May Szerbs re-entrance into our literary pantheon be definitive. -Alberto Manguel Mihlys relationship with Tams is so myopic and worshipful as to bring back memories ofDeath in Venice, but I respect Szerbs book more...the book is one of the few written before the deluge that acknowledges a bourgeois unreality with an unblinkered eye. -David Auerbach One of the friends I mentioned put a small book in my hand and said: Len, you must read this. Every educated Hungarian knows and loves this book. It was Antal S