Venice between the wars, a Hungarian couple on their honeymoon. But “Venice is where the trouble began”—where Mihály finds that he prefers wandering backalleys to the company of his bride, Erzsi. In Ravenna they are interrupted at an outdoor café by a man who zooms up on a motorcycle. It is a man from Mihály’s past, with a mysterious grudge and an inexplicable demand: that Mihály seek out a friend of their childhood who had been spotted in a procession of monks. Outside of Florence, Mihály fails to board the train that is to carry him and Erzsi to Rome. Thus begins Mihály’s odyssey through the cities and countryside of Italy and back through the youth that haunts him. Here he is reunited with a charismatic sister and brother, Éva and Tamás, whose strange amateur theatricals have left sex and death forever linked in Mihály’s mind; Ervin, a rival for Éva’s love and a Jew turned Catholic monk; and the man on the motorcycle, János.

Antal Szerb’s dreamlike story is a reckoning with freedom and responsibility, the pulls of love and destruction, and the ways that the past returns to be relived or rejected.

Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was a writer, scholar, critic and translator born to Jewish parents but baptized Catholic. Multilingual, he lived in Hungary, France, Italy and England, and after 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 and Hungarian literature.

At the age of 39, Szerb wrote an authoritative History of World Literature. He wrote his first novel, The Pendragon Legend, in 1934, followed by Journey by Moonlight in 1937 and The Queen's Necklace in 1943. These, and a collection of his short stories, Love in a Bottle, are also published in English by Pushkin Press. Szerb was killed in a concentration camp in January 1945.