Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight is the moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.
Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon, he soon abandons his wife in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by a desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary’s Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to a placid adult life or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.
Love at First Sight
At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an...
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