Having limbered up with The Pendragon Legend, I last week read Antal Szerb's acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight. This one is a very different kind of novel, but the tone of voice – playful, quicksilver, endlessly ironical – is very similar. Szerb has a gift for making his material at once deadly serious and not serious at all (is this a Hungarian thing?). Journey by Moonlight chronicles what is in effect a catastrophic mental breakdown, but it is closer to a fast-moving, unpredictable, often funny adventure or escape story than to a psychoanalytical study. Szerb's is, decidedly, a comic imagination – and a very distinctive one.
Journey by Moonlight has the kind of opening paragraph that defies you not to keep on reading:
'On the train everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back alleys.'
Mihaly, we learn, is on his first visit to Italy, at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon. He has travelled a good deal, but always avoided Italy:
'Italy he associated with grown-up matters, such as the fathering of children, and he secretly feared it, with the same instinctive fear he had of strong sunlight, the scent of flowers, and extremely beautiful women.'
But now he was married, on his honeymoon, so 'now, he reasoned, there was nothing to fear from the danger Italy represented'. Until, that is, he felt the irresistible pull of those Venetian back alleys and, unplanned and unannounced, spent the night wandering in a daze among them. This is the beginning of Mihaly's 'journey by moonlight'.
Trying to explain this nocturnal fugue to Erzsi, his long-suffering wife, he tells the story of a phase in his boyhood when he came under the spell of a group of free-spirited friends, dominated by the beautiful, death-obsessed Eva and Tamas Ulpius. It is in that luridly intense period of Mihaly's past that the key to all that follows resides, and it is to that phase of his life that Mihaly's flight from present reality repeatedly returns him. When one of those friends of his youth, the unreliable Janos, turns up in person, Mihaly is shaken and knows he cannot carry on with his life as it is. Soon he leaves Erzsi behind by half-consciously boarding the wrong train and taking off on his own, with no idea of where he's going. His journey takes him from one Italian city to another, and to various remoter locations, guided only by hints from Janos, who keeps turning up wherever Mihaly finds himself. But can the troubled Mihaly ever find a way of breaking free of the past that haunts him?
That bald (and very incomplete) synopsis makes Journey by Moonlight sounds a lot more solemn than it is – indeed solemnity is a note that Szerb's writing never strikes. Reading him is always, for all sorts of reasons, fun; he's a great storyteller, and Journey by Moonlight is a real page-turner. It is also one of those books that is, I think, liable to haunt you for a long while after you've put it down.
Szerb was a glittering star of the Hungarian literary firmament, the author of three major scholarly surveys of English, Hungarian and world literature, as well as the novels and numerous short stories. But he was Jewish (the son of assimilated Jews, and a baptised Catholic), and therefore vulnerable in the Hungary of the times. In 1944 he was removed from his professorship at the University of Szegad and sent to a forced labour camp. Friends and admirers offered to save him with falsified papers, but he turned them down, wishing to share in the common fate of his people. He was beaten to death in 1945, at the age of 43, and buried in a mass grave.
Showing posts with label Antal Szerb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antal Szerb. Show all posts
Friday, 10 August 2018
Monday, 2 July 2018
A One-Off
I've been reading a very strange, but hugely enjoyable, book by Antal Szerb, a Hungarian writer who was recommended to me by an unfailingly reliable source. He is best known – inasmuch as he's known at all over here – for his novel Journey by Moonlight, which I intend to read very soon, but I decided to start with his first, The Pendragon Legend (first published in 1934 and reissued in 2006, newly translated, by the excellent Pushkin Press).
The Pendragon Legend is best described as a romp – but a romp like no other I've ever come across. This is a Hungarian writer throwing himself full tilt at a very British kind of action adventure, mixing into his particular blend elements of supernatural thriller, romantic fiction, murder mystery, gothic horror, modern psychoanalysis, ancient alchemy and historical memoir – all of which are lightly parodied and satirised. As are the curious ways of the English and Welsh upper classes, observed with bemused wonder by the Hungarian narrator, who is himself presented as a kind of parody of the stereotype fiery Hungarian, with his weakness for adventure and romance (and indeed sex, of which there is a surprising amount, though all of it is discreetly presented).
The novel was the product of a year spent in England, much of it in the reading room of the British Museum, where the learned Szerb was researching for his compendious histories of English and of world Literature. He was also pursuing a keen interest in Rosicrucianism, alchemy and the occult, and he puts his knowledge of those fields to good, but far from serious, use in The Pendragon Legend, much of which involves spooky goings-on in a castle whose previous occupants included a pioneering alchemist who, it seems, might have discovered the secret of eternal life.
It's an introduction to the Earl of Gwynedd, a descendant of the great alchemist, that plunges our hero, Dr Janos Batky, into the headlong thrills-and-spills adventure that then unfolds, at dizzying speed. Eagerly accepting an invitation to the Earl's Welsh seat, Blatky immediately encounters some very rum goings-on, and some pretty rum people, as the spicy goulash of a plot thickens at an alarming rate. Soon, without quite realising it, Blatky is in way over his head...
The Pendragon Legend is surely the least Hungarian of Hungarian novels, and it's impossible to think of any parallel. Perhaps there's something of the dashing tone of the young William Gerhardie (Futility), but no further resemblance. As a read, it's a highly entertaining page-turner, whose preposterous plot is strangely compelling, probably because of the unexpected sidelights, jokes and insights that keep popping up among the nonsense. There's a decidedly modern, ironic – and, of course, Hungarian – sensibility in evidence amid all the Gothic set pieces. Journey by Moonlight is, by all accounts, an entirely different kettle of fish, much deeper and darker. I look forward to reading it.
The Pendragon Legend is best described as a romp – but a romp like no other I've ever come across. This is a Hungarian writer throwing himself full tilt at a very British kind of action adventure, mixing into his particular blend elements of supernatural thriller, romantic fiction, murder mystery, gothic horror, modern psychoanalysis, ancient alchemy and historical memoir – all of which are lightly parodied and satirised. As are the curious ways of the English and Welsh upper classes, observed with bemused wonder by the Hungarian narrator, who is himself presented as a kind of parody of the stereotype fiery Hungarian, with his weakness for adventure and romance (and indeed sex, of which there is a surprising amount, though all of it is discreetly presented).
The novel was the product of a year spent in England, much of it in the reading room of the British Museum, where the learned Szerb was researching for his compendious histories of English and of world Literature. He was also pursuing a keen interest in Rosicrucianism, alchemy and the occult, and he puts his knowledge of those fields to good, but far from serious, use in The Pendragon Legend, much of which involves spooky goings-on in a castle whose previous occupants included a pioneering alchemist who, it seems, might have discovered the secret of eternal life.
It's an introduction to the Earl of Gwynedd, a descendant of the great alchemist, that plunges our hero, Dr Janos Batky, into the headlong thrills-and-spills adventure that then unfolds, at dizzying speed. Eagerly accepting an invitation to the Earl's Welsh seat, Blatky immediately encounters some very rum goings-on, and some pretty rum people, as the spicy goulash of a plot thickens at an alarming rate. Soon, without quite realising it, Blatky is in way over his head...
The Pendragon Legend is surely the least Hungarian of Hungarian novels, and it's impossible to think of any parallel. Perhaps there's something of the dashing tone of the young William Gerhardie (Futility), but no further resemblance. As a read, it's a highly entertaining page-turner, whose preposterous plot is strangely compelling, probably because of the unexpected sidelights, jokes and insights that keep popping up among the nonsense. There's a decidedly modern, ironic – and, of course, Hungarian – sensibility in evidence amid all the Gothic set pieces. Journey by Moonlight is, by all accounts, an entirely different kettle of fish, much deeper and darker. I look forward to reading it.
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