Antal Szerb

Un hombre de letras y doctor en filología, el húngaro János Bátky, de 32 años, se encuentra en Londres en el verano de 1933 estudiando las teorías de los teósofos ingleses del siglo XVII, el ocultismo, la alquimia, la historia de los rosacruces y la vida y obra de Robert Fludd. Su vida fria y ordenada de estudioso se ve sacudida cuando conoce a Owen Pendragon, conde de Gwynedd, un aristocrata quijotesco que lo invita a visitar la biblioteca del castillo de sus ancestros en Llanvygan. Alli, desde la primera noche, comienzan a suceder una serie de peripecias concretadas bajo la forma de amenazas fantasmagoricas. Ademas, el conde es victima de una conspiracion y realiza visitas clandestinas a una fortaleza en ruinas que esconde la tumba de un antepasado rosacruz y un maravilloso secreto. El robo en Londres de un viejo manuscrito precipita los hechos hacia un final que incluye un ritual magico de iniciacion y una sorprendente resolucion del caso. La leyenda de los Pendragon traza un juego inteligente en el que, sobre un decorado de relato gotico e historia detectivesca, se entrecruzan unos episodios propios de las peliculas del Hitchcock ingles de los años treinta salpicados de agudezas dignas de Oscar Wilde.

Una novela de aventuras, de pasión y de viajes por la Europa de entreguerras. Un clásico de la literatura húngara. Mihaly, vástago inadaptado de una familia burguesa de Budapest, a sus treinta y seis años llega a italia en su luna de miel. Casi sin querer, abandona a su flamante esposa en una estacion de ferrocarril y comienza un itinerario tan disparatado como onirico.

An absolute treat Szerb is a master novelist a comedian whose powers transcend time and language Nicholas Lezard GuardianAt an end of season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar Dr János Bátky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours Invited to the family seat Pendragon Castle in North Wales Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go Once there nothing is quite as it seems Antal Szerb s first novel is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres crossed with a murder mystery to produce a fast moving and often hilarious romp But beneath the surface Szerb s steely intelligence poses disturbingly modern questions about the nature of self and reality

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, GuardianAt an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Batky, is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go. Once there, nothing is quite as it seems... Antal Szerbs first novel is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres, crossed with a murder mystery to produce a fast-moving and often hilarious romp. But beneath the surface, Szerbs steely intelligence poses disturbingly modern questions about the nature of self and reality.

"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century" Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph The bored young ruler of an idyllic Central European country plots a coup against himself and escapes to Venice in search of real experience. There he falls in with a team of ambitious con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself. In this wonderfully droll tale the kings journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the world, his foreordained role in it, and himself. Once again Szerbs gentle irony is brought to bear on some uncomfortable paradoxes of self and the human condition.

Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers Ali SmithA novel to love as well as admire, always playful and ironical, full of brilliant descriptions, bon mots and absurd situationsGuardianA major modern classic: the turbulent story of a businessman torn between middle-class respectability and sensational bohemoiaMihaly and Erzsi are on honeymoon in Italy. Mihaly has recently joined the respectable family firm in Budapest, but as his gaze passes over the mysterious back-alleys of Venice, memories of his bohemian past reawaken his old desire to wander.When bride and groom become separated at a provincial train station, Mihaly embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that leads him finally to Rome, where he must reckon with both his past and his future. In this intoxicating and satirical masterpiece, Szerb takes us deep into the conflicting desires of marriage and shows how adulthood can reverberate endlessly with the ache of youth.Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globeTranslated by Len RixAntal Szerb was born in Budapest in 1901. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend, Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, as well as the historical study The Queens Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories.

A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europes last great humanists.In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerbs last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died.Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was born in Budapest. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend, Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, as well as the historical study The Queens Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories.

In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale.This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolinis new Roman Imperium.Antal Szerb was born in Budapest in 1901. Best known in the West as a novelist and short story writer, he was also a prolific scholar whose interests ranged widely across the whole field of European literature. Debarred from a university post by reason of his Jewish ancestry, he taught in a commercial secondary school until increasing persecution led to his brutal death in a labour camp, in 1945. Yet the tone of his writing is almost always deceptively light, the fierce intelligence softened by a gentle tolerance, wry humour and understated irony. Pushkin Presss publications of Szerbs work include his novels Journey by Moonlight, Oliver VII and The Pendragon Legend, as well as the short story collection Love in a Bottle and the history The Queens Necklace.

A major classic of 1930s literature, Antal Szerbs 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 ...Mihaly 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, Mihaly loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungarys 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 Szerbs Journey by Moonlight is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.

¿Es posible escribir una comedia que se pregunta por la condición humana en medio de una Europa asaltada por los nazis? Es más, ¿y si a ello le añadimos que el propio escritor está en peligro? Óliver VII lo atestigua.Creada bajo ese contexto, esta obra de Antal Szerb su ultima novela posee un espiritu sincero y espontaneo en el que todo, a primera vista, es increiblemente ingenuo. Pero su inocencia arroja una sombra; de manera silenciosa y no obvia, sus lineas nos sugieren un interior de tristeza. La misma historia de su publicacion es reveladora: solo pudo ser editada en su momento haciendose pasar por una traduccion de un autor ingles, pues ningun escritor judio podia publicar ya en la Hungria de 1943.Oliver VII es una fabula agridulce concebida bajo el punto de mira de la diana nazi y escrita con un humor idealista que muestra los valores inspiradores de una humanidad misericorde, sabia y justa pero que fueron olvidados al paso de la desesperanza que cruzo Europa.

Aún poeta en ciernes, el joven Antal Szerb proclama su amor arrebatado y sin embargo lleno de ternura a su ciudad. Aquel Budapest en tempo lento, sentimental y afable, escenario regio y mundano a un tiempo, la gran urbe donde los sueños de sus familias patricias, los Esterházy, los Széchenyi se hacían piedra de suntuosos palacios o largos puentes sobre un Danubio, que en la estación invernal se convertía en una inmensa pista de hielo, del viejo Tabán, habitado por gentes sencillas, con sus callejuelas y sus tabernas bulliciosas frecuentadas por poetas, del Uj-Lipotvaros con sus vanguardistas casas de estilo Bauhaus o del Ujpest fabril y pueblerino por donde pasean cogidas del brazo las hermosas obreras al terminar su jornada. Budapest. Guía para marcianos es un juego sutil de cajas chinas de la nostalgia, de la ciudad desvanecida que llora el poeta, de la ciudad que contempla con el rostro maravillado, de la ciudad bajo cuyos puentes y colinas fluye eterno el Danubio.

Una luna de miel truncada. Una adolescencia perdida. Una novela de aventuras, amor y viajes por la Europa de entreguerras.La novela más conocida del autor arrancacomo una clásica obra realista, detema burgues, representando con fina ironia el viaje de novios de un matrimonio hungaro a Italia. Pero las pequeñas aventuras del viaje van cobrando un matiz cada vez mas fantastico y surrealista mientras los viajeros se van impregnando de deseos miticos.Partiendo del abandono, la obra busca respuestas a la pregunta de si el hombre puede librarse del yugo de su propio yo y si es posible volver al pasado de la carcel de la adultez y de un matrimonio falso que carece de toda armonia.

En Mihàly i l’Erszi són un matrimoni hongarès de viatge de noces per itàlia. Tots dos passen de la trentena, i una nit, després de topar amb un vell conegut del marit, ell decideix explicar-li a la d