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.