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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.
ANTAL SZERB was born into a cultivated family of Jewish descent in 1901. He graduated in German, English and Hungarian, and rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry, studies of Blake and Ibsen, and Histories of English, Hungarian and World Literature. In 1933 he was elected president of the Hungarian Literary Academy. He was also known as an essayist, playwright and as the author of various novellas and a historical fiction, The Queen’s Necklace. He died in a labour camp in 1945.
TRANSLATED from the Hungarian by Len Rix
Cover Illustration László Moholy-Nagy
ISBN (10) 1 901285 790
ISBN (13) 978 1901285 796
ATTENTION : B FORMAT!
ISBN (10) 1 901285 901
ISBN (13) 978 1 901285 901
FULL REVIEWS
“Antal Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century.”
PAUL BAILEY -The Independent
"(...) 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'
"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
“Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language, and a playful, sophisticated intellect.”
NICHOLAS LEZARD - The Guardian
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