Book description
THE RESTLESS RULER of an obscure Central European state plots a
coup against himself and escapes to Venice in search of 'real'
experience. There he falls in with a team of con-men and ends up, to
his own surprise, impersonating himself. His journey through
successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the
world, about his own nature and the paradoxes of the human condition.
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.
