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.