Though he is suffocated by his deeply conventional existence, he is incapable of finding an alternative way to live. His vicarious fascination with transgression is reigned in by what he calls his “order-loving, dutiful bourgeois soul”. Like Sartre’s Mathieu Delareu, Mihaly has reached the ‘age of reason’ recently married, a partner in a small father-son Budapest law practise, his life is seemingly mapped out before him.

At the beginning of the novel Mihaly and his newlywed Erzsi are on honeymoon in Venice, but before too long Mihaly abandons her and begins a strange odyssey, traversing the historic landscape of Italy in a mysterious search for meaning and identity that takes him into confrontation with the characters and obsessions that populate his subconscious. The novel follows the peregrinations of Mihaly as he drifts around Italy, with a shifting support cast of miscellaneous rootless dreamers. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, it examines the clash between unconscious desires and the arbitrary mores of bourgeois society, in a world whose meaninglessness and irrationality has been brutally exposed by war.Īs its title suggests, Journey by Moonlight is a book with a haunted, dreamlike quality, a transmigration of souls like WG Sebald’s Vertigo or The Emigrants. Whereas the canonical texts of English literature tend to have a certain whiff of respectability – Victorian moral disquisitions, stately pentameter odes, earnest examinations of social themes, even Shakespearean tragedies sanitised by innumerable polite performances in the West End – Journey by Moonlight is a novel laced with unreconstructed existential menace.

It is, it transpires, regarded in Hungary as perhaps the nation’s most important 20 th century novel a modernist classic to rank alongside the likes of Ulysses, The Trial, A la recherché and Berlin, Alexanderplatz, and taught in schools up and down the country. Journey by Moonlight was a serendipitous find – an unknown (to me) European modernist classic, reissued by Pushkin Press and jettisoned by some kind or foolish soul in Oxfam Books, with a glowing blurb from that most reliably discerning of broadsheet critics, Nicolas Lezard.

Szerb antal journey by moonlight