THREE FOR TWO PROMOTION
Journey by Moonlight
TRANSLATED BY Len Rix
Cover illustration by Luca Pagliari
ISBN 978 1 901285 50 5
The Pendragon Legend
Translated by Len Rix
Cover Illustration by Simon Marsden
ISBN 978 1 901285 89 5
Oliver VII
Translated by Len Rix
Cover illustration by László Moholy-Nagy
ISBN 978 1 901285 79 6
About the Book - Journey by Moonlight
ANXIOUS TO PLEASE his bourgeois father, Mihaly has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their honeymoon in Italy Mihaly "loses" his bride at a provincial station and embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that leads him finally to Rome. There all the death-haunted and erotic elements of his past converge, and he, like Erzsi, has finally to choose. Journey by Moonlight, Szerb's quintessential amalgamation of the
romantic, the mystical and the transcendental is a Pushkin Press
bestseller.
"Never off our bestseller list, this radiant novel thoroughly deserves its place here"
London Review Bookshop
"Journey by Moonlight is a burning book, a major book"
GEORGE SZIRTES Times Literary Supplement
"No one who has read it has failed to love it"
NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
About the Book - The Pendragon Legend
AT THE END-OF-LONDON-SEASON soiree, the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone-call warning him not to go. But he does, and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism and romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways-old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains and underground tombs.
"Szerb, however, aware that gothic literature had long become its own parody, played his story for laughs. The result is a dark tale of spiritual quest told in the style of the Marx brothers"
ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times
"The novel shoots back and forth between London and Wales; and, quite astonishingly, there is not a false note in it. (...) Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language (again, thanks to Rix for his tender approach to the source material), and a playful, sophisticated intellect. (...) There is so much in this book that it is impossible to summarise, except to say that it is a romp, but one which romps within itself; it has fun with the conventions, and has fun with having fun with them, too. It is an absolute treat, deliciously ludic, to be read with a big smile on your face throughout"
NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
"Szerb was fluent in German and English and greatly interested in unusual religious beliefs. His knowledge of Rosicrucianism and the occult informs this often very funny book, which takes many affectionate potshots at the period's popular fiction. Szerb, who produced a history of English literature, knew his Shakespeare, Blake and Milton, but also the frothier writings of John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and P G Wodehouse"
PAUL BAILEY The Independent
"A writer of immense subtlety and generosity, with an uncommonly light touch which masks its own artistry. His novels transform farce into poetry, comic melancholy into a kind of self-effacing grace. Can literary mastery be this quiet-seeming, this hilarious, this kind? Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers"
ALI SMITH
About the Book - Oliver VII
THE RESTLESS RULER of an obscure Central European state plots a coup against himself and escapes to Venice in search of ‘real’ experience. There he falls in with a team of con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself. His journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the world, about his own nature and the paradoxes of the human condition.
"There is more to (Oliver VII) than fable. It actually has much in common with Journey by Moonlight - the flight from identity, the alleys of Venice, the choices that must be made between duty and pleasure, or between two women. And it has its comedy, too"
NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
"(...) Pushkin Press, who, in a fruitful association with the translator Len Rix, have been bringing the works of the great early twentieth century Hungarian novelist, Antal Szerb, into English for the first time, this year with Szerb's final novel, Oliver VII, written on the cusp of the Nazi foulness which prematurely ended his life - a work that is a piece of sweet, shining good humour outfacing history's dark."
ALI SMITH Times Literary Supplement 'Best Books of the Year 2007'
About the Author
Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of Jewish descent. Graduating in Hungarian, German and English, he rapidly established himself as an outstanding scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry, studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian, and World Literature. His first novel, the satirical-philosophical The Pendragon Legend, 1934, was set in London and Wales. His acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight, appeared in 1937. The Queen’s Necklace was composed, together with a third novel, Oliver VII, amidst the wreckage of war: both were instantly banned. In 1945 Szerb died in a forced-labour camp in Western Hungary. A collection of stories and novellas, Love in a Bottle, and three volumes of his literary-critical essays, were published posthumously.
"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century"
PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph
"Uncork your best Tokay to toast the Pushkin Press for publishing these translations. May Szerb’s re-entrance into our literary pantheon be definitive."
ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times
"A
writer of immense subtlety and generosity, with an uncommonly light
touch which masks its own artistry. His novels transform farce into
poetry, comic melancholy into a kind of self-effacing grace. Can
literary mastery be this quiet-seeming, this hilarious, this kind?
Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers"
ALI SMITH
"Szerb is a master novelist whose powers transcend time and language"
NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
