Antal Szerb Update.

 

After publishing my post on this writer’s wonderful novel Journey by Moonlight, I received an Email from Pushkin Press, asking if I knew about the new cover for this book, as mine was quite an old version (2002). The obvious pride and passion concerning this detail of the book aroused my interest enough that I wanted to find out more. It turns out that not only does Journey by Moonlight, have a fantastic new cover, but that Pushkin Press have five books by this author all with matching imagery and all being published on the 06/06/2013, making these not just a great set of reads but a beautiful addition to any bookshelf.

Antal Szerb Update.

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In this classic 1930s novel, a businessman
struggles to reconcile his bourgeois duties
with an irresistible desire to resurrect
his lost youth among Hungary’s Bright
Young People. Szerb’s darkly comic
novel traces the effects of a socially and
sexually claustrophobic world on the
life of one man, torn between placid
normality and sensational adventure.

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The restless King Oliver VII of Alturia,
an obscure Central European state
whose only notable exports are wine and
sardines, wants nothing more than an easy
life: so, plotting a coup against himself,
King Oliver VII escapes to Venice in
search of ‘real’ experience. There he
falls in with a team of con-men and ends
up, to his own surprise, impersonating
himself. His journey through successive
levels of illusion and reality teaches him
much about the world, about his own
nature and the paradoxes of the human
condition.

 

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At an end-of-the-London-season soirée,
the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante
Janos 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 …
Antal Szerb’s first novel The Pendragon
Legend is a gently satirical blend of gothic
and romantic genres, crossed with the
murder mystery format.

 

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In August 1785, Paris buzzed with
a scandal that had everything—an
eminent churchman, a female fraudster,
a part-time prostitute and the hated
Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the
most expensive diamond necklace ever
assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly,
blindness and self-delusion it provoked.
Here, the great Hungarian novelist Antal
Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint
from which to survey the entire age—
including aspects of it seldom considered
by more orthodox historians.

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Hungarian Antal Szerb is best known
in the West as the author of three
extraordinary novels, most notably
Journey by Moonlight (1937), and a highly
entertaining study of Ancien Régime
France, The Queen’s Necklace (1942). This
selection of his stories and novellas, set
variously in mythical times and in the
London and Paris of the twenties and
thirties, reflects his love of life and the
irrepressible irony that is his trademark.
This revised edition contains two stories
not originally included.

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Biography.

Antal Szerb – Wiki

kirjasto.sci.fi/szerb

Pushkin Press Catalogue