Journey by Moonlight

Antal Szerb

Oct 2020 · Pushkin Press · Narrated by Johny Pitts

About this audiobook

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 ...'
Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there, on his honeymoon with Erszi, he soon abandon 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, Mihály 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.

About the author

Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family. He obtained a doctorate in German and English Literature and was a prolific scholar, writing numerous books on drama, poetry and literary history, including the still-influential History of World Literature (1941). His first novel, The Pendragon Legend, published in 1934, is set in London and Wales. Journey by Moonlight, appeared in 1937, followed in 1942 by Oliver VII and The Queen's Necklace. Szerb died in the forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945.