I can’t think of a better way to start writing about Antal Szerb’s wonderfully indescribable 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight, which I read in Len Rix’s translation of the original Hungarian Utas és Holdvilág, than to quote a bit of the book, a passage that sums up what’s ailing its main character, Mihály, who’s thirty-six years old:
As he spoke it all came to the surface—everything that since his escape had lived inside him like a repressed instinct: how deeply he felt a failure in his adult, or quasi-adult life, his marriage, his desperation to know where he might start again, what he could expect from the future, how he could get back to his true self. And above all, how he was tortured by nostalgia for his youth and the friends of his youth.
I’ll comment on a few key phrases from these lines, which
appear about halfway through the novel…
As he spoke: These lines describe Mihály during a night-time
talk, a confession of sorts, at a monastery near Gubbio, Italy, with an old
friend from Mihály’s youth, a Jewish man who’s converted to Catholicism and
become a monk.
His escape and his marriage:
Mihály came to Italy on his honeymoon but “lost” his new wife, Erzsi, during a
station stop on a train journey. Oops! Erzsi is a piece of work herself. She left
her husband to marry Mihály and she goes to Paris after Mihály’s disappearance,
where she runs into a watch-stealing (hmm) old friend of Mihály’s. Erzsi’s ex,
who’s a businessman, is so concerned about her that he sends a hilarious and
lengthy letter to the honeymooning Mihály, offering advice on Erzsi’s care and
feeding. This was one of my favorite passages in the book: items include “Make
sure she eats enough,” “Take special care over her manicurists,” “Don’t let her
get up too early,” and advice on Erzsi and PMS. The letter is signed “with affectionate greetings and true respect. Zoltán.”
A repressed instinct: One of Mihály’s biggest problems is that
he works in the family business and doesn’t feel comfortable about it. Many
descriptions and reviews of Journey by
Moonlight refer to class, its expectations, and what it represses: the
description on the back of my book begins with “Anxious to please his bourgeois
father, Mihály…” Class is certainly at the root of Mihály’s angst, though the
question of class as such felt far less interesting to me than my next point…
Tortured by nostalgia for his youth and the friends of his youth:
Nostalgia is, in my reading, what eats at Mihály most. About twenty pages
before the chunk I quoted above, Mihály told his doctor “I know what’s wrong
with me… Acute nostalgia. I want to be young again. Is there a cure for that?”
The doctor says he doesn’t know of one, then says, “Think of Faust. Don’t
hanker after youth.” Later on that same page, the doctor gives Mihály garlic to
tie around his neck; Mihály says he’s read Dracula.
The doctor, by the way, is just one of several characters that functions almost like a
member of Mihály’s personal Greek chorus, people he meets or remeets in his travels.
I found Mihály’s nostalgia most interesting because he
yearns for the romanticism, decadence (not in our modern sense of too much
cheese or chocolate sauce), and eroticism of his high school years, when he
spent lots of time skipping school, drinking alcohol and coffee, talking about
Dostoevsky, and otherwise hanging out with a group of friends led by a brother
and sister named Tamás and Éva. Their exceptionally close sibling relationship
and even Tamás’s death (romanticized), are a long-term source of jealousy for
Mihály. It all reminds me (minus the brother-sister dynamics, suicide, and a couple
other things) of a favorite Russian novella that I’m translating, Konstantin
Vaginov’s Bambocciade, which is also
from the 1930s. Though Vaginov’s angle is different—the nostalgia is for the
dead and the years before the Russian revolution—both writers quietly use
history, whether Italian fascism or Soviet communism, as a backdrop, and both
focus largely on youngish people who wander and aren’t quite sure how to handle
themselves in their societies.
I know that probably sounds horribly dull, sentimental, and
pedantic. To which I can only add that I enjoyed Journey by Moonlight very, very much. Though it felt a tiny bit too
long in a few spots, it’s so human, humorous, and filled with cultural memory that I’d recommend it
to just about anyone.
Disclaimers: The usual. I’ve enjoyed speaking with Pushkin Press about books in translation. I
received a copy of Journey by Moonlight from
publisher Pushkin Press. Thank you very much!
Up Next: Inga
Ābele’s High Tide, another lovely
book that’s difficult to describe. Then Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop.