Journey by Moonlight

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937-1945) and translated from

the Hungarian by Peter Hargitai recounts the misadventures of a

closeted intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional morality

and its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihály takes his

new bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where chance separates

them, and he finds himself on the run from his marriage. Wandering

aimlessly from Perugia to Rome, he begins a break-through journey

of fatally erotic longing that culminates on the edge of an abyss too

dark to contemplate. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, his

visionary states are eerily prophetic about one of the darkest periods

in human history and of the author’s own doom.