A major classic of 1930s literature,Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.
'On the train,everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice...'
Mihaly has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there,on his honeymoon with Erszi,he soon abandons his new wife in order to find himself,haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful,kind Tamas,brash and wicked Janos,and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva.
Journeying from Venice to Ravenna,Florence and Rome,Mihaly loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside,driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things,and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life,or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.
Journey by Moonlight is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature,a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death,which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man. Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix,Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.
Publisher: Pushkin PressISBN: 9781901285505Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'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,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
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