Journey by Moonlight (Hungarian: Utas és holdvilág, literally "Traveler and Moonlight") is a 1937 novel by Hungarian writer Antal Szerb. It is among the best-known novels in contemporary Hungarian literature. According to English literary critic Nicholas Lezard, it is "one of the greatest works of modern European literature [...] I can't remember the last time I did this: finished a novel and then turned straight back to page one to start it over again. That is, until I read Journey by Moonlight."[1]
Plot
The novel follows Mihály, a Budapest native from a bourgeois family on his honeymoon in Italy as he encounters and attempts to make sense of his past. The novel features his romantic figure, aloof and poetic, but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism, but also with the disturbing attraction of an erotic death-wish.
Some of the neurotic episodes that Mihály experiences throughout the story have been understood as motifs related to Freudian psychoanalysis, which had been especially influential at the time in Hungary.[2]
János Szepetneki, Ervin, Tamás and Éva Ulpius: Mihály's old friends
Zoltán Pataki: Erzsi's first husband
Release details
1937, Hungary, Révai, published 1937, paperback, ISBN9789631424638, (first Hungarian edition)
1994, New York, USA, Püski-Corvin Books,ISBN0-915951-21-5, Library of Congress Number 93-84996, published 1994, paperback (as "The Traveler", translated by Peter Hargitai (this novel's first English edition)
2001, London, Pushkin Press ISBN1-901285-37-5, published 1 May 2001, paperback (as "Journey by Moonlight", by Len Rix (this translation's second edition)
2006, London, Pushkin Press ISBN1-901285-50-2, published 27 February 2006, paperback (as "Journey by Moonlight")
2012, Zagreb, Croatia, ISBN978-953-332-000-7, published 2012, Naklada OceanMore, paperback (as "Putnik i mjesečina" / "Traveler and Moonlight" – Croatian first edition)
The novel has been translated into German, French, Italian, English,[3] Spanish, Dutch, Slovene, Swedish, and Croatian.
