The trouble comes to a head when Mihály misses the train he and Erzsi are due to take to Rome. 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 picks up in Ravenna, where a hostile man zooms up on a motorcycle as the couple are sitting at an outdoor café. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s honeymoon tour of Italy. That is, until I read Journey by Moonlight.It’s 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 managed to translate Szerb’s 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 “Just divine.I can’t remember the last time I did this: finished a novel, and then turned straight back to page 1 to start it over again. Can literary mastery be this quiet-seeming, this hilarious, this kind? Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers.” -Ali Smith “A writer of immense subtlety and generosity. Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix / ISBN 9781590177730 / 320-page paperback from New York Review of Books Classics
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