Antal Szerb has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Traveller and the Moonlight.
Journey by Moonlight
Summary
A major classic of 1930s literature, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire. 'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...' Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there, on his honeymoon with Erszi, he soon abandon his new wife in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life, or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure. Journey by Moonlight is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man. Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.
©2020 Pushkin Press. Translated by Peter Czipott (P)2020 Pushkin Press
Traveller and the Moonlight
Summary
Antal Szerb’s superb novel, originally published in Hungarian in 1937, is now acknowledged as a classic of European literature. The story follows the misadventures of Mihaly as he travels to Italy on honeymoon with his new wife, Erszi. In Venice, he begins to tell her the story of his youth, dominated by his great friendship with the charismatic siblings Tamas and Eva Ulpius, who live in a crumbling mansion in Budapest. From that moment on the marriage begins to fall apart, as it becomes clear that Mihaly can never escape the ghosts of his past. Bewitched by his memories, he sends Erszi back to their hotel while he loses himself in the alleys of Venice, before embarking on a chaotic journey across Italy, searching for Tamas, for Eva, and anyone connected with them. Tragically, Antal Szerb, of Jewish descent, died in a concentration camp aged just 43. He was offered a chance to escape by admirers of his work but chose to die along with the rest of his generation. Peter Hargitai, an expatriate Hungarian poet, author, and academic now resident in Florida, had a meeting with Szerb’s widow in 1988. When he questioned her about the central enigma of the book, the identity of Tamas, and the elusive intertwining of the Ulpius siblings, she replied “Tamas IS Eva”. As a native Hungarian speaker Hargitai brings an expert ear to this new translation, and a focus on the sexual ambiguity of this extraordinary masterpiece. Is it Eva, or is it Tamas, who is the object of Mihaly’s obsession? Mihaly, haunted by his memory of the morbid, erotic games played by Tamas and Eva, with himself as sacrificial victim, searches through a Europe soon to be ravaged by war. Bizarre, surreal and at times macabre, this is a brilliant translation of an exceptional novel Peter Hargitai was born in Budapest, Hungry, in 1947.
©1937 Antal Szerb (P)2021 Antal Szerb