Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics)

An NYRB Classics Original The trouble begins in Venice the first stop on Erzsi and Mihlys honeymoon tour of Italy. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble picks up in Ravenna where a hostile man zooms up on a motorcycle as the couple are sitting at an outdoor caf. Its Jnos someone Mihly hasnt seen for years and he wants Mihly to come with him in search of Ervin their childhood friend. The trouble comes to a head when Mihly misses the train he and Erzsi are due to take to Rome. Off he goes across Italy wandering from city to city haunted and accosted by a strange array of figures from the troubled youth that he thought he had left behind: There are the charismatic siblings va and Tams whose bizarre amateur theatricals linked sex and death forever in his mind; Ervin a Jew turned Catholic monk who was his rival for vas love; and again that ruffian on the motorcycle. Antal Szerbs dreamlike adventure like Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita is an intoxicating utterly individual mix of magic madness eros and menace. In the words of the critic Nicholas Lezard No one who has read it has failed to love it.