| Journey by Moonlight | |
| Title Orig: | Utas és holdvilág |
| Translator: | Len Rix |
| Author: | Antal Szerb |
| Country: | Hungary |
| Language: | Hungarian |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Publisher: | Révai Testvérek (Hungarian),Pushkin Press (English) |
| Release Date: | 1937 (English: 2001, 2003) |
| Media Type: | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Isbn: | 1-901285-37-5 |
| Dewey: | 894.51133 21 |
| Congress: | PH3351.S86 U813 2001 |
| Oclc: | 47978000 |
Journey by Moonlight (Hungarian: Utas és holdvilág, literally "Traveler and Moonlight") is a 1937 novel by Hungarian writer Antal Szerb. It is among the best-known novels in contemporary Hungarian literature. According to English literary critic Nicholas Lezard, it is "one of the greatest works of modern European literature [...] I can't remember the last time I did this: finished a novel and then turned straight back to page one to start it over again. That is, until I read Journey by Moonlight."[1]
The novel follows Mihály, a Budapest native from a bourgeois family on his honeymoon in Italy as he encounters and attempts to make sense of his past. The novel features his romantic figure, aloof and poetic, but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism, but also with the disturbing attraction of an erotic death-wish.
Some of the neurotic episodes that Mihály experiences throughout the story have been understood as motifs related to Freudian psychoanalysis, which had been especially influential at the time in Hungary.[2]
The novel has been translated into German, French, Italian, English,[3] Spanish, Dutch, Slovene, Swedish, and Croatian.