Journey by Moonlight

An NYRB Classics Original

Venice between the wars, a Hungarian couple on their honeymoon. But “Venice is where the trouble began”—where Miha’ly finds that he prefers wandering backalleys to the company of his bride, Erzsi. In Ravenna they are interrupted at an outdoor cafe’ by a man who zooms up on a motorcycle. It is a man from Miha’ly’s past, with a mysterious grudge and an inexplicable demand: that Miha’ly seek out a friend of their childhood who had been spotted in a procession of monks. Outside of Florence, Miha’ly fails to board the train that is to carry him and Erzsi to Rome. Thus begins Miha’ly’s odyssey through the cities and countryside of Italy and back through the youth that haunts him. Here he is reunited with a charismatic sister and brother, E’va and Tama’s, whose strange amateur theatricals have left sex and death forever linked in Miha’ly’s mind; Ervin, a rival for E’va’s love and a Jew turned Catholic monk; and the man on the motorcycle, Ja’nos.

Antal Szerb’s dreamlike story is a reckoning with freedom and responsibility, the pulls of love and destruction, and the ways that the past returns to be relived or rejected.

Antal Szerb (1901–1945), born in Budapest, was a writer and scholar noted as one of the major literary personalities of the twentieth century. He established a reputation as an academic at a very young age, spoke several languages, and lived in France, Italy, and England. In late 1944 he was deported to a concentration camp where he died months later. Among his major fictional works are Journey by Moonlight, The Pendragon Legend, and Oliver VII.

Len Rix is a translator of Hungarian literature, best known for his translations of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight and Magda Szabo’s The Door, both of which will be published as NYRB Classics in Fall 2014. He lives in the U.K.

Julie Orringer is an American writer from Miami. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and her stories have appeared in McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, as well as in several anthologies. She has a collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, and one novel, The Invisible Bridge. She lives in Brooklyn.