A Hungarian in Italy, desperate in search of himself

It's daunting to think of all the books that would enrich our lives (and our writing, in the case of readers who are also writers) if we read them, but that we don't even know exist. In an age of frenetic overabundance like ours, perhaps this is one of the main missions of publishing houses, which conceive of literature not only as a business but also as a discovery, a broadening, and an exploration of knowledge and experience of the world. The mission would not so much consist of rescuing books from oblivion—because only those that have been taken into account fall into oblivion—but rather of making known that certain ignored books exist and presenting them in such a way that it is clear that they are worth reading. This is what the publishing house Males Herbes has done by publishing this exuberant and chaotic phantasmagoria entitled The traveler and the clarity of the moon, by Antal Szerb (Budapest, 1901-Balf, 1944), a Jew who converted to Catholicism and was beaten to death in an extermination camp.

The plot of Szerb's novel, set in interwar Hungary and Mussolini's fascist Italy, has a roving structure and a surprising and inventive character, as if it were mixing the basic elements of the Cervantes-style novelistic tradition (stories and history, realism) with the resources, tricks, and some of the usual themes of German Expressionist films produced by the UFA. The protagonist is Mihály, a thirty-something Hungarian from Budapest who, after a dissolute, experimental, and poetic youth, has been working diligently in the family business for fifteen years and has just married Erzsi, an experienced woman who has left him after divorcing her first husband. On a honeymoon in Italy, one day while the couple is in Venice, Mihály reconnects with an old friend from his youth, shady and untimely, who reminds him of memorable people (a brilliant, suicidal friend, an enigmatic girl who swept him off his feet) and formative episodes from his past. All of this makes Mihály suddenly realize he's not living the life he wants to live.

This is the central conflict of the novel: Mihály's realization that he has undergone a process of bourgeoisification – he feels like an existential failure – and the erratic and inquisitive desperation to which this leads him. Because the central core of the novel is the journey to Italy that the protagonist undertakes after leaving his wife behind and that leads him to reconnect with his past, and that allows Szerb to create a novel in which everything coexists and everything mixes: the history of art and the history of religions, drugs and money, the drug user and money, pleasure and the fascination with death, erotic yearnings and the asceticism of Franciscanism... Versatile and daring, Antal Szerb created a novel that hybridizes the lightness of Decameron of Boccaccio and the full gravity of the English Romantic poets, the pure and naive colors of Giotto and the gloomy atmosphere of Böcklin. It's a shame that the novel becomes deflated, disorganized, and loses interest in those passages where the narrative focus shifts from Mihály.