The joy with which László Krasznahorkai (Gyula, 1954) received the news of the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, which was quickly tinged with anguish. "Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me: they congratulated me, asked for interviews, even though many of those journalists had never read me, and I even received a letter from the town where I was born inviting me to pay for a new wooden bridge they needed," he recalls in Barcelona, ​​months later. "All I wanted was to disappear," he insists. He couldn't make that dream a reality until January, shortly after delivering his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, in which, starting from the desire to address "hope," he ended up recounting a personal anecdote from the Berlin subway in the early 1990s: a homeless man appeared, struggling to urinate in a corner, and, unaware of his infraction, was chased after to stop him.

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.