Journey by Moonlight

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937-1945) and translated fromthe Hungarian by Peter Hargitai recounts the misadventures of acloseted intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional moralityand its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihaly takes hisnew bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where chance separatesthem, and he finds himself on the run from his marriage. Wanderingaimlessly from Perugia to Rome, he begins a break-through journeyof fatally erotic longing that culminates on the edge of an abyss toodark to contemplate. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, hisvisionary states are eerily prophetic about one of the darkest periodsin human history and of the author s own doom.