Book description
"No one who has read it has failed to love it."-Nicholas
Lezard, Guardian
"Szerb belongs with the master
novelists of the twentieth century."-Paul Bailey, Daily
Telegraph
ANXIOUS TO PLEASE his bourgeois father, Mihaly
has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his
bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising
that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their
honeymoon in Italy Mihaly "loses" his bride at a
provincial station and embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that
leads him finally to Rome. There all the death-haunted and erotic
elements of his past converge, and he, like Erzsi, has finally to choose.
ANTAL SZERB was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of
Jewish descent. Graduating in German and English, he rapidly established
himself as a prolific scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry,
studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian, and
world literature. His first novel, The Pendragon Legend, was written in
1934. Journey by Moonlight appeared in 1937, followed in 1943 by The
Queen's Necklace and various volumes of novellas. He died in the
forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945. LEN RIX was born in
Zimbabwe, where he took a degree in languages, before reading English at
Cambridge. His remarkable renderings of Antal Szerb's The Pendragon
Legend, Journey by Moonlight , Oliver VII and Love in a Bottle have seen
him shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Price and awarded
the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
