Synopses & Reviews
An NYRB Classics Original
Venice between the wars, a Hungarian couple on their honeymoon. But “Venice is where the trouble began”—where Mihály finds that he prefers wandering backalleys to the company of his bride, Erzsi. In Ravenna they are interrupted at an outdoor café by a man who zooms up on a motorcycle. It is a man from Mihály’s past, with a mysterious grudge and an inexplicable demand: that Mihály seek out a friend of their childhood who had been spotted in a procession of monks. Outside of Florence, Mihály fails to board the train that is to carry him and Erzsi to Rome. Thus begins Mihály’s odyssey through the cities and countryside of Italy and back through the youth that haunts him. Here he is reunited with a charismatic sister and brother, Éva and Tamás, whose strange amateur theatricals have left sex and death forever linked in Mihály’s mind; Ervin, a rival for Éva’s love and a Jew turned Catholic monk; and the man on the motorcycle, János.
Antal Szerb’s dreamlike story is a reckoning with freedom and responsibility, the pulls of love and destruction, and the ways that the past returns to be relived or rejected.
Synopsis
Antal Szerb (1901–1945), born in Budapest, was a writer and scholar noted as one of the major literary personalities of the twentieth century. He established a reputation as an academic at a very young age, spoke several languages, and lived in France, Italy, and England. In late 1944 he was deported to a concentration camp where he died months later. Among his major fictional works are
Journey by Moonlight,
The Pendragon Legend, and
Oliver VII.
Len Rix is a translator of Hungarian literature, best known for his translations of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight and Magda Szabo’s The Door, both of which will be published as NYRB Classics in Fall 2014. He lives in the U.K.
Julie Orringer is an American writer from Miami. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and her stories have appeared in McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, as well as in several anthologies. She has a collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, and one novel, The Invisible Bridge. She lives in Brooklyn.
About the Author
An NYRB Classics Original
The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s 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 café. It’s János, someone Mihály hasn’t seen for years, and he wants Mihály to come with him in search of Ervin, their childhood friend. The trouble comes to a head when Mihály 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, Éva and Tamás, whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind; Ervin, a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for Éva’s love; and again, that ruffian on the motorcycle.
Antal Szerb’s dreamlike adventure, like Bulgakov’s The 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.”