Journey by Moonlight
Journey by Moonlight (, literally "Traveler and Moonlight") is among the best-known novels in contemporary Hungarian literature. Written by Antal Szerb, it was first published in 1937. According to Nicholas Lezard, it is "one of the greatest works of modern European literature...I can't remember the last time I did this: finished a novel and then turned straight back to page one to start it over again. That is, until I read "Journey by Moonlight"." Plot introduction. The novel follows Mihály, a Budapest native from a bourgeois family on his honeymoon in Italy as he encounters  and attempts to make sense of his past. The novel features his romantic figure, aloof and poetic, but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism, but also with the disturbing attraction of an erotic death-wish. Some of the neurotic episodes that Mihály experiences throughout the story have been understood as motifs related to Freudian psychoanalysis, which had been especially influential at the time in Hungary. Release details. Beside English, the novel has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovene, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish and Croatian.