Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics)

An NYRB Classics Original

The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mih¡ly€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 caf©. It€s J¡nos, someone Mih¡ly hasn€t seen for years, and he wants Mih¡ly to come with him in search of Ervin, their childhood friend. The trouble comes to a head when Mih¡ly 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 Tam¡s, whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind; Ervin, a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for ‰va€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, €œNo one who has read it has failed to love it.€