Mihaly and Erszi are a couple from Budapest on honeymoon in Italy. They are "accidentally" separated at a railway station and Mihaly starts a mystical and dazzling journey, first in search of a childhood friend who has become a priest and then plunging into a sensual Rome. Meanwhile Erszi leaves for Paris to contemplate her failed marriage and meets a stranger who will initiate her into life "beyond the wall."
Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin paper)
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Review
"Journey by Moonlight is a burning book, a major book" George Szirtes Times Literary Supplement "No one who has read it has failed to love it" Nicholas Lezard The Guardian "Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century" PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Szerb was a scholar and literary historian of considerable eminence in Hungary. His History of Hungarian Literature is still considered authoritative some 50 years after his death in a concentration camp. He left two novels, Journey by Moonlight and The Pendragon Legend.
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Paperback
I really liked this book because it a love history, but not just a love to a couple but love to do what you want to do. The love for get your dreams under your own ideas.It's a good book that everyboy must read.
"Less than the cloud to the wind
Less than the foam to the sea
I am to thee"
"Less than the cloud to the wind
Less than the foam to the sea
I am to thee"
By Temudjin Oh
Format:Paperback
You can see from the first page that Mihaly is not comfortable with the idea of a honeymoon. A trip that is meant to finally draw a line under the extreme and intimate relationships and obsessions of his adolescence only plunges him more deeply into an irrational and self-destructive nostalalgia for the world within a world inhabited by his friends Tamas, Ervin, Janos and most of all the dangerous and captivating Eva. Szerb allows us into the Mihaly's deepest thoughts as he seems to recapture and then abandon the memories of his first love on a roadtrip around the backwaters and tourist traps Mussolini's Italy. He tries to weigh up his choices of soul and suicide or sex and security. There are times when the reader probably wants to just slap Mihaly and tell him to grow up but you secretly hope that somehow he can rediscover the naivity and purity of his youth, or at least find a more bohemian alternative than returning to work for his father in the Varaljai Hemp and Flax Works. It is funny, fascinating and frustrating in turn. Szerb has written a Hungarian take on Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles', with more sex, more grounding in the economics of middle-class middle Europe and with less iron, but more irony.
By JSollami
Format:Paperback
This book is a classic in Hungarian literature, so I've learned, and it rightly deserves its status. Deceptive in style, and written almost from a Kafkaesque perspective, one feels as if one is walking in the landscape of "The Castle," but dealing with characters from Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." The blend of the two is intriguing, and the feeling this work gives of 1930s European degeneracy and ennui is alluring and, one assumes, authentic, since it was first published in 1937 but has been made available in English for the first time now. The work isn't for everyone. It can be a bit ponderous and requires a certain mindset to appreciate its subtleties and its pace. But it is well worth reading for those with a literary bent, since, without a doubt, it is a highly nuanced literary work.
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4.2 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Complex characters, beautifully written
Apparently, this book is staple reading for Hungarian students and I can see why. The shape of the overall story is satisfying with complex characters who change their minds a lot... Read more
Published on Feb 17 2004 by HumbleReader
1.0 out of 5 stars
I've read both versions of this book...
The first and most unforgiving error Len Rix made was the title. The original translation, titled The Traveler, is a much better read if one wants to get the full effect Szerb... Read more
Published on Aug 9 2003 by natalie sosa
4.0 out of 5 stars
Death is a Character
The most compelling character in this novel is dead. Tamas appears only as a memory, a ghost, haunting Mihaly, the central character, until he is sick with nostalgia. Read more
Published on Jun 11 2002 by Chelle
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making the Journey Brighter
This is the best book I have ever read, and at age 65 after a great deal of reading, that should mean something. Read more
Published on April 16 2002 by Ozzie Maland
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is one of the great undiscovered masterpieces
I cut out a review of this book I read in the Times Literary Supplement Best Books of the Year round-up. Read more
Published on Feb 6 2002
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