Hungarian Classic Now World Classic: Journey By Moonlight Seduces Literati

Antal Szerb’s novel Journey By Moonlight is not be regarded by many to be Hungary’s greatest novel. It’s not the most erudite, decorated, or well known. But it is the favorite of any number of Hungarian romantics, and increasingly, of foreigners who came to the book in translation. While the British have been enjoying the Len Rix translation for many years, the novel was only released in America a few years back, by the ultra prestigious New York Review of Books.

It’s hard to overstate the effect Journey By Moonlight has on a certain type of reader (the same sort who obsess over The Secret History, or Master and Margarita). In its day, back in its day (published in 1937) it was rumoured to have incited more than one suicide.

The story follows a young man named Mihály on his honeymoon and eventual abandonment of his wife Erzsi, when the ghosts, both literal and figurative, of his past surface in locations across Italy. With its morbid, magnetic, and simultaneous attractions to love and death, Journey by Moonlight is easily compared to Death in Venice. But Journey by Moonlight is more pastoral, bubbling over with sticky sweet, but ultimately fatal nostalgia for youth and lost love; it actually has a lot in common with Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border West of the Sun.

Perhaps Journey by Moonlight has never been fully embraced as Hungary’s greatest novel because it was not based in Hungary. Antal Szerb was truly a novelist of the world, setting his first effort The Pendragon Legend in England, Journey by Moonlight in Italy, and Oliver VII in an imaginary European country. Unlike other Hungarian writers, his love of country was never expressed through meditations on Hungarian society, or via revolutionary poetry. Much like his stories, his patriotism was somehow not bound to such terrestrial conventions. A lot of good his subtlety did him; as an ethnic Jew, he was forced by the Hungarian facist Arrow Cross into a labor camp in 1944. Antal Szerb died before age 45, at the hands of his own countrymen. It should be pointed out that Szerb was given many chances to emigrate, even while he was enduring the degradations of labor camp, but he refused to leave his family and fellow writers behind. Unlike his protagonist, he never surrendered his ideals in the face of an uncaring and brutal world. He died the quiet death of an unsung hero. The world of literature is vastly richer for his brief journey through its midst.

Antal Szerb via Wikipedia

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