Their first days were spent quietly enough, between the pleasures of honeymooning and the gentler, less strenuous forms of sightseeing. This style of comedy is also used to satirize society at large, with little gems such as: Deeply Freudian in places, Szerb explores the notion of humanity’s innate death-wish through the slyly comic viewpoint of Mihály’s inability to decide if he wants to commit suicide. It explores where love, desire and death collide in our hearts and minds, with a light touch and a tone that switches between the serious and the playful. The attempt to recapture his past becomes a search for the ghost of his beloved and charismatic friend Tamás and his alluring sister Evá who, though still alive, is forever just out of reach – a name on someone else’s lips. Mihály’s personal drama is played out amongst the ghosts of Italy with its history and depilated monuments. Impressed by the sudden moment of freedom, he embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey chasing his lost bohemian youth in the ruins of Italy. Each looking to the other for escape, but for utterly different reasons, their fledging marriage hits the rocks when Mihály accidentally boards the wrong train and loses his wife at the station. Set in Italy and Paris pre-WW2, ‘Journey by Moonlight’ tracks the progress of Mihály, a respectable bourgeois lawyer of Budapest, on his honeymoon with wife Erzsi. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys. I had until that point never heard of Antal Szerb, or his little masterpiece ‘Journey by Moonlight’. I’m a sucker for foreign or unusual sounding names.
It was the author’s name that caught my eye. Some weeks ago, whilst pulling more books I don’t have time to read out of the library, I happened to glance up and notice this novel.
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