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.

Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was a Hungarian literary scholar and novelist.
His 1937 novel Utas és holdvilág, variously translated as The Traveler
(1994), Journey by Moonlight (2001), and Traveler and the Moonlight
(2016), endures as a pioneering contribution to the modernist literary
canon. Hargitai's Journey by Moonlight celebrates its first English-language
publication and honors the memory of Antal Szerb whose life was cut
short in a Nazi labor camp. Three months before the war's end, on January
27, 1945, his guards beat him to death and tossed him into an anonymous
mass grave. It would take fifty years for his name to appear on a memorial
when the novel's American translator and his university students had the
name of Antal Szerb inscribed into the Holocaust Memorial wall in the
City of Miami Beach.