At other times, however, he cannot but confront the reality of his abject poverty-his shabby attire, his seedy lodgings, his cheap unsatisfying fare. He is stubbornly dismissive of details such as money, insisting that they smack of baseness, and we feel that he has succeeded in renouncing his former life. At times he is exultantly happy, feeling that he has succeeded in escaping his dreary middle-class origins and oppressive Hungarian commitments. Like any good fugitive, Mihály remains on the move, traveling from one city to another. Erzsi, a symbol of the chaste respectability that Mihály finds himself increasingly unable to stomach, quickly becomes a burden, and when Mihály accidentally on purpose-he isn’t sure, and we aren’t sure-boards the wrong train, abandoning his new bride in a compartment bound for a different city, he frees himself of his ties to Hungary and heads to Siena in headlong pursuit of something wild, romantic, and fundamentally ineffable. Though Mihály has resigned himself to a petty bourgeois existence, taking a position in his father’s firm and marrying a sobering and practical woman, he finds himself entranced by the Italian countryside-its aura of historical gravity, its savage beauty, and the offer of madness and magic that its tangle of close, crooked backstreets seems to extend. The masterwork of Antal Szerb, a celebrated Hungarian man of letters who is practically unknown in the English-speaking world, Journey by Moonlight follows a malcontent Hungarian businessman, Mihály, and his new bride, Erzsi, on their honeymoon in Italy. It is above all strange, a brief reprieve from the logic according to which happiness and sadness are opposed to one another. It is difficult to say whether the book is happy or sad, or both, or neither. This fall Journey by Moonlight, a beloved Hungarian classic first published in 1937, will at last make its American debut. Journey by Moonlightby Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix (New York Review Books)
0 kommentar(er)
