Have you ever read just one book by an author and felt prepared to claim that author among your favorites? I wrote about it rather poorly, but that was how I felt after reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. That book, which I read just about a year ago, went right to my heart, my mind, my inside. After reading it I started searching out Szerb's other works in a passive way; when I found myself in a bookshop, I'd usually remember to see if they had anything. They never did. Journey By Moonlight is his most well known work by a long shot. I'm not even sure there is a U.S. publisher for his other works. Early on in quarantine, remembering my luck ordering used books from the UK in the fall, I thought what the hell, and ordered 3 of his books in these pretty Pushkin Press editions.*
I'm not sure what precisely drove me to pull out The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy this morning. I certainly didn't expect I would finish it by this evening (though it is a small book: just 105 pages and smaller than standard trade paperback size). The book is an account, told in small, episodic observations, of a trip Szerb made to Italy in August of 1936. The Spanish Civil War hangs in the background (in the first chapter, Szerb tells us he wanted to go to Spain but settled on Italy due to current events, and the situation in Spain pops up here and there). Fascism in Italy is more in the foreground; he bears witness to it in his accounts of the newspapers he reads, the people he sees on trains and along his travels. The tensions elsewhere in Europe are palpable. In Venice, he notes that hotels where French is spoken are expensive, while those where German is spoken are cheap. While I know something of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I don't have a great sense of Hungarian history or culture specifically. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what a vacation in Italy would be like for a Hungarian of Jewish heritage in 1936, even as I was reading an account of just that. (He does touch on the reaction he receives when he tells people he's from Hungary, which seems to be a mild fascination.) Szerb's passing references to Hungarian writers before him whose names meant nothing to me left me feeling rather ignorant. (Besides Szerb, the only Hungarian writer I've read is Sandor Marai and Imre Kertész is the only other I can name off the top of my head.)
When I started The Third Tower this morning, I tweeted, "I read the first two pages of this book and I already know I'm about to have my heart broken" with the photo at right. This journal turned out indeed to be an account of Szerb's farewell visit to Italy. War arrived in earnest not long after this. Szerb was put in a concentration camp in 1944 and was killed there in 1945. He was not even as old as I am now.
*While you're there, I encourage you to peruse the author pictures on the Pushkin Press authors page, which I find unaccountably amusing. I was surprised to stumble across a photo of the previous author I read, Eduardo Halfon, while I was scrolling down to Szerb.
