Customer Reviews

Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin Paper)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A classic in Hungarian literature, so I've learned, this work rightly deserves its vaunted status. Deceptive in style, and written almost from a Kafkaesque perspective, one feels as if one is walking in the landscape of "The Castle," but dealing with characters from Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." The blend of the two is intriguing, and the feeling this work gives of 1930s European degeneracy and ennui is alluring and, one assumes, authentic, since it was first published in 1937 but has been made available in English for the first time now. The work isn't for everyone. It can be a bit ponderous and requires a certain mindset to appreciate its subtleties and its pace. But it is well worth reading for those with a literary bent, since, without a doubt, it is a highly nuanced literary work.

I'm afraid to say that some of the customers who reviewed this fantastic translation of a classic are terribly wide of the mark. Rix's translation certainly does retain the lyricism and beauty of the Hungarian-language original, and to suggest that his work is an "insult to Szerb" makes one wonder whether the reviewers have an ulterior motive for praising Hargitai's version at the expense of Rix.
Incidentally, as a European man I can tell that I certainly would say "I reckon." Also, has your reviewer examined the original Hungarian passage? It may well be that Tamás' language is the colloquial Hungarian equivalent of "I reckon." Len Rix is a scholar of the highest order (and a fluent speaker of Hungarian, I might add) and to suggest that he is not aware of such subtleties is laughable.
Your reviewers might also like to consider why Rix's translation was regarded as a "Book of the Year" in a number of publications, and why it was praised by none other than George Szirtes, who as they will know is a poet, critic, and Hungarian.

To acclaim a book as "the best Hungarian novel I have read" might seem like faint praise. Actually, between Sándor Márai and Gyula Krúdy, I have read in translation several quite good novels originally written in Hungarian. But JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT surpasses them. Written in 1937, it deserves to be included among the best European literature of the 1930s, perhaps even a much broader time frame.

JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT is set in the 1930s, but its atmosphere is that of the 19th Century. The novel begins with Mihály and Erzsi, both of solidly Budapest bourgeois background, on honeymoon in Italy. Mihály is not your typical protagonist. He is as much anti-hero as hero, more passive than assertive. He becomes obsessed with nostalgia for his past and paralyzed by fecklessness concerning his future and he abandons Erzsi to embark on a solo tour of Italy. The novel then traces the remainder of their "honeymoon" until each, by entirely separate paths that do however intersect once, returns to Budapest. During their journeys, each undergoes a number of psychological travails; each encounters other sexual temptations; and each is confronted several times with the choice between conformity to bourgeois values and release of himself/herself to the realm of desire. In addition, Mihály is continuously confronted with the choice between Eros and Thanatos. (For those so inclined, the novel contains abundant material suitable for psychoanalytical interpretation.)

What most distinguishes JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT is its tone. The novel is light, playful, and ironic. Frequently Szerb's tongue is obviously planted firmly in cheek. The humor usually is under-stated, but it nonetheless elicited from me the occasional chuckle. Despite poking fun at his characters, Szerb at bottom is warm-hearted and good-natured. The fantastical and magical continuously asserts itself on the narrative, but never quite takes over. Sometimes it is shouldered aside by madcap farce and other times it relapses to a seemingly sober realism.

The novel is interlaced with Szerb's gently biting commentary on all sorts of European matters, especially Italian. (Szerb had had extended stays in England, France, and Italy.) For example, he observes of Mussolini's Fascist Italy that: "The Italian papers were always ecstatically happy, as if they were written not by humans but by saints in triumph, just stepped down from a Fra Angelico in order to celebrate the perfect social system. There was always some cause for happiness: some institution was eleven years old, a road had just turned twelve." But Szerb also, even-handedly, applies his trenchant eye to his own: After Milhály awakes from a drunken stupor in an Italian working-class home and neighborhood, "his hand unconsciously groped for his wallet. The wallet was there in its place, next to his heart, where the Middle-European, not entirely without a touch of symbolism, keeps his money."

Throughout, the novel keeps the reader off-balance. It is so playful that one is tempted to pigeonhole it as sheer entertainment, albeit quite charming and sophisticated entertainment. But I think beneath all the dazzle there are some serious themes or messages. In Rome, Mihály is shown some Etruscan drinking bowls, with the inscription (in Etruscan): "Enjoy the wine today, tomorrow there will be none." And Szerb's answer to the novel's (and the Middle European) preoccupation with suicide is that "while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen."

A paragraph about the author, with whom I was completely unfamiliar before this book caught my eye: Antal Szerb (1901 - 1945) was yet another victim of the Holocaust. He was born to assimilated Jewish parents but was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic Church. He became a Professor of Literature and a highly regarded scholar of Western literature, and he wrote four novels in the last decade of his life. Despite opportunities to do so, Szerb refused to flee Hungary even after the Nazis occupied the country and ratcheted up their anti-Semitic demands on the Hungarian government. In late 1944 Szerb was sent to a forced-labor camp where, in January 1945, he was beaten to death. That story shares a few tragic features with the story of Bruno Schulz. I sense that the Nazi murder of Antal Szerb worked as grievous a loss on world literature as did the execution of Bruno Schulz.

Note: Amazon also carries another translation of the novel, under the title "The Traveler". There are over 270 reviews of "The Traveler", most of them by students at Florida International University where the translator of that rendition is on the faculty. I am in no position to compare the merits of the two translations, but I will say that the translation by Len Rix in JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT is highly literate and fully engaging.

This is the best book I have ever read, and at age 65 after a great deal of reading, that should mean something. The review in <The Guardian> in July 2001 also lavished extravagant praise on the book, but picked a little bone about the treatment of the suicide theme. Albert Camus said that suicide was the great question of the entire 2oth century. This book portrays the character transformation that occurs when an individual really confronts his mortality, his fear of death, his falling into an abyss. This confrontation is important for healing and nowhere is it portrayed better than in Szerb's book.

Mihály, the central character of this elegant and stylish novel (beautifully translated by Len Rix) seems to belong to the early continental 19th century rather than to inter-war Budapest. He is a man in his late thirties, a neurotic and Romantic character, unworldly, more at home in history than in the present, ill at ease in his bourgeois setting at home and equally ill at ease about being in his late thirties. He has a great nostalgia for the time when, as an adolescent schoolboy, he was the hanger-on of a group of unconventional young people: Tamás (who several times tried to commit suicide and eventually managed it); his sister Eva (whom Mihály adored); Ervin (another of Eva's admirers, a convert to Catholicism from Judaism); and János, a suave trickster.

The book opens twenty years later, when Mihály is on his honeymoon in Venice with his wife Erszi. Erszi had left her first husband to marry Mihály because he was `different'; he had seduced and then married her because he was trying to be `normal'. But she did not understand just how `different' he was, and he could not cope with marriage; and, besides, he is haunted by the memory of the now mysterious Eva. During a stop-over on a railway journey, Mihály makes the Freudian error of getting onto one train while Erszi is travelling on another. He is relieved to be on his own and that noone can find him. He travels from one Italian location to another - all beautifully and sometimes hauntingly described. I must not reveal the many strange, mysterious and coincidental events that happen to him; but in any case his thought processes are at least as central to the story as are the various events.

Meanwhile Erszi, unable to face her family in Budapest as a deserted wife, makes her way to Paris. There she, too, in her own way, turns against the respectable bourgeois life she has hitherto been leading. Again I must not elaborate; but the story is full of fascinating psychological twists and turns (though one of them, in an ancient chateau on a rainy night, does, I must admit, strike me as uncharacteristically grotesque and over the top - quite out of tune with the delicacy of the rest of the novel.)

The note of death is heard throughout the novel. As a youngster Mihály had to take part in the theatricals staged by Tamás and Eva which invariably involved death, with Mihály willingly playing the sacrificial victim. Later, there are suicides, cemeteries, Etruscan sarcophagi and the apparent Etruscan notion that "dying is an erotic art", which so resonates with Mihály and had done so for Tamás. Mihály hears a remarkable lecture on that subject from Professor Waldheim, one of his former class-mates whom he meets in Rome - and from that moment onwards Szerb plays some extraordinary games with his readers.

A subtle, rich and wonderful book.

Apparently, this book is staple reading for Hungarian students and I can see why. The shape of the overall story is satisfying with complex characters who change their minds a lot but in the end, ring true. Lovely descriptions of various European settings. What I liked best about this book was that although it was first published in the late 1930's I kept forgetting when it was set. There is a timeless quality about the story, a bittersweet fact for contemporary readers with the hindsight of history. We know what the characters and author did not about what was to come in those parts of Europe, especially Hungary. It is sad that Szerb's brief life did not enable him to write more, but I'm glad that Journey by Moonlight was recently republished so that I got the chance to read it; hooray for translator Len Rix.

The most compelling character in this novel is dead. Tamas appears only as a memory, a ghost, haunting Mihaly, the central character, until he is sick with nostalgia. It's the death of this friend, indeed the very concept of death itself, that drives the novel.

Death is an ever present character in *Journey by Moonlight*. It is sometimes regarded intellectually. Occassionally it is childlike, willful almost in its unconditional yearning. But it is always intimately there. I've hardly ever seen death approached with so little fear, so little trepidation, in a novel before. Usually, if a character is willing to die, it is because they are resigned to it. Here they desire it. And, in the case of Tamas, they make it happen. I found the many interpretations and mythologies of death and suicide to be quite interesting. I regarded it as a learning experience that kept me turning the pages.

The characters, the ones we are suppose to have some feeling for, are disappointing. They're not flat--in fact, they are quite multi-dimensional--but they lack sympathetic substance. In this case, the less you knew about the character, the more interesting and likable/dislikable they were. That would be, perhaps, my only true complaint. Oh, and also that an individual's dialogue lasted for five or six pages without pause. It played havoc with the pacing even if it was nicely written.

So, I would have given the novel 3.5 stars if I could have, but I'll just use the extra half a star as a bravo to Pushkin Press for releasing a quality book with rich paper and a neat typeset.

The outstanding JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT begins with the Rome honeymoon of Mihaly and Erzsi, a bourgeois couple from Pest. This is the first marriage for the 36 year-old Mihaly, who expected this marriage to cap a fifteen year period of disciplined conformity and hard work. Meanwhile, this is the second marriage for Erzsi, who has renounced her wealthy first husband to marry Mihaly, who she views as a person of subtle rebellion and mystery. But on the honeymoon, Mihaly has a strange breakdown when the power of his intense adolescent friendships resurfaces and overwhelms his commitment to a responsible bourgeois life. Then the couple, through sheer chance, separates and the bride and groom each enter a period of self-seeking, which exposes both the power of their pasts and their core values. JbM is truly exceptional fiction.

Szerb organized JbM into four sections. The first shows Mihaly during his breakdown, when he demonstrates mighty ambivalences, as well as tells the gripping story of his youthful friendships. In section two, Mihaly begins to emerge from his breakdown, when he travels in arbitrary fashion through Tuscany. In this section, his troubling ambivalences lessen and he finds solace in the Italian countryside, which Szerb describes with a loving eye. In section three, a calmer Mihaly emerges and begins to reengage with the jilted Erszi, who is living in Paris. This Mihaly, while still peculiar, is hilarious. And he encounters an old friend, an eccentric academic, who puts an intellectual gloss of Mihaly's strange nostalgia for his adolescent friends. Part four shows these newlyweds in surprising moments of truth, with Mihaly becoming even funnier. "You were always a strange boy," his father observes in the book's final few paragraphs.

This is a major work of fiction in which Szerb manages to address such subjects as rebellion, the pursuit of personal truth, and some very weird thoughts about the propinquity of eroticism and death in a highly original and often hilarious tale.

I'm out of my depth here: But is this Woody Allen meets Thomas Mann?

Highly recommended.

Mihaly is on his honeymoon in Italy having wed Erzsi who left her husband for him.But far from being overjoyed, Mihaly is haunted by his youth, a time where the outside world didn't matter and he lived in the world invented by himself, Ervin, Tamas and his beautiful sister Eva whom he still yearns for.But it came to an end. Tamas commited suicide, Ervin became a monk and Eva disappeared and Mihaly went into his fathers business.In Italy he hears of Eva and Ervin living there.He abandons his wife and goes in search of his lost youth and happiness....
The story unfolds in a witty narrative and delves into death and how we approach it-both as mortals and the death of our past. It says alot about the quality of Szerb's writing that-despite him being a fairly disreputable character, you never lose sympathy with Mihaly as anti hero.
This was written in 1937, a year of huge political tensions in Europe, and Szerb had grown up seeing the Austrio-Hungarian Empire to which he was born collapse following the brutal First World War;the tearing apart of Europe between the twin evils of fascism and communism and his opposition to fascism and I was anticipating some of this background entering the tale, but-like Mihaly's youth where the outside world didn't matter or exist-the Europe of 1937 barely gets a mention other than a passing mention of Mussolini and Mihaly talking to a young fascist; neither being of importance.Indeed it seems to Szerb that these things don't matter in the scheme of things; mankinds been inventing religious and political isms and utopias since the caveman days-all hopeless and often bloody failures. What does count to Szerb is the human condition and how he faces life and death.
Once I got the '1937' era out of my mind and just read the story instead of anticipating it, I found the true gift and pleasure in this intelligent and witty book.

This is one of the finest books I've ever read, a masterpiece of 20th century European lit. As with only the very best literature, you will know yourself better after reading it, and then you'll want to read it again.