Reading Matters

'Journey by Moonlight' by Antal Szerb

Fiction - paperback; Pushkin Press; 240 pages; 2010. Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.

Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight has been on my wishlist since November 2007 when I spotted it in my local Waterstone's. At the time I was looking for novels set in Venice, and this one seemed to fit the bill perfectly. So I was delighted when it was chosen as the July read for the book group to which I belong.

Sadly, Venice only plays a minor role in the story, much of which is set in other parts of Italy, including Perugia, Florence and Rome.

It deals with a Hungarian couple, Mihály and Erzsi, who get married following a one-year affair in which Erzsi leaves her husband. By all accounts they should be madly in love, yet the cracks are beginning to show when they go on their honeymoon to Venice. For a start, Mihály, keen to explore the city's secret alleyways, stays out all night, without telling his new wife. Then, when he meets an old school friend, who is appallingly rude about Erzsi to her face, he gets lost in a world of nostalgia that only serves to strain their relationship further.

Things go from bad to worse when he gets on the wrong train, having disembarked for coffee en route from Florence to Rome, leaving Erzsi behind. I don't think it is a plot spoiler to say the marriage is effectively over, but it is how both parties deal with the outfall that makes up the bulk of the novel. While most of the narrative follows Mihály's quest to come to terms with his past, we do get fleeting glimpses of Erzsi's new life.

Yet the book is frustrating, because the narrative is so uneven, and the (meagre) plot is littered with far too many coincidences to be believable.

But the novel's strength lies in its intellectual ruminations on death, not just the physical ending of life, but on the loss of youth and how we grieve for past lives and experiences which can never be recaptured. For Mihály, a man from a privileged background, it is almost as if has never learnt to do anything or decide anything for himself; he's been swept along by other people, including a dominant father, and he has never figured out where he truly belongs, other than in the past, where he felt "alive" amongst his childhood friends, a set of intriguing siblings, Éva and Tamás.

In fact, Mihály might be in his mid-30s but he seems alarmingly adolescent in his inability to grow up and get on with his life. And there are elements of his passivity, his ennui, which suggest to me that he might be suffering from undiagnosed depression.

But lest you think Journey by Moonlight suffers under the weight of its own pretensions, the novel has some comic, often absurd moments. And Szerb, who wrote this book in 1937, isn't afraid to poke fun at his characters. Indeed, he seems to relish making some of them, such as János, who is accused of being a pick-pocket, a little bit dastardly.

While I cannot pretend to love this book as much as others — the reviews on the blurb from The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement make it sound like a masterpiece — it's an interesting story about a lost soul trying to find his way in life.

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This book was chosen by Polly for our Riverside Readers book group.

'Esther's Inheritance' by Sándor Márai

 

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 148 pages; 2009. Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes.

This novella, first published in 1939, tells the story of a thwarted love affair between Esther, a vibrant young woman, and Lajos, the man who betrayed her by marrying someone else.

Twenty years have passed and Esther has lived a quiet life of solitude with Nunu, the elderly matriarch of the family, in a large house without electricity ("we kept postponing it because of the expense") and a modest garden. Now her peace is shattered when Lajos sends a telegram to say he and four others will be arriving tomorrow for a visit.

When Nunu declares she will lock up the silver, you immediately realise the visit, and Lajos' character, are not particularly welcome.

What follows reads a bit like a stilted play, with characters moving in and out of the spotlight one at a time, all wringing their hands and talking in overtly theatrical ways. It's a slow, subtle read, but it does sneak up on you, albeit almost 100 pages into the story.

The plot contains a series of revelations that I don't want to mention here for obvious reasons, although it's no secret that Lajos is a complete scoundrel who has spent his life treating people as objects to bend at his will (what we call a psychopath today): he has no morals, no conscience and blames others for the errors of his ways. Or, as Esther so aptly puts it:

You are a strange gambler; you play with passions and people instead of cards. I was one of the queens in your hand. Then you stood up and went off elsewhere. Why? Because you grew bored. You had had enough and simply walked away. That's the truth. That is the terrible immoral truth. One can't throw a woman away the way one does a matchbox simply because one has passions, because that happens to be one's nature, because one finds it impossible being tied to a woman or because one is ambitious, or because everything and everyone is merely useful.

The ending is suitably dramatic, although it doesn't exactly spell things out clearly, and it left me wondering about Esther's motivations: was she everything she purports to be?

I think this is one of those books that probably invites a second or third reading to draw out the hidden meanings and to examine more closely the things that people say to one another in order to determine who's lying and who is not.

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to point out that Márai writes rather beautiful prose, such as the following description of the day of Lajos' visit:

Gossamer was drifting between the trees, and the air was sparkling clear without a trace of mist, a thin transparent solution coating everything with the finest enamel, as if all visible objects, including the sky itself, had been touched in the most delicate of brushes.

If you read Esther's Inheritance and like it, I can recommend Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past, which treads similar territory and was written at about the same time, but is more "readable" in the sense it grips from the word go, rather than being a slow-burner, and is much less histrionic.