I read Antal Szerb's
Journey by Moonlight in 2019 and
declared it my favorite book I read that year. With it still very much on my mind early in the pandemic, I ordered a bunch of his other books and I read
two of them in 2020. That left me with two novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays yet to read. Last week, when I decided to start on one of the novels, I realized I had been saving them. Now, having finished
Oliver VII, Szerb's last novel, I have only his first left, plus the essays and stories. Plus I'm sure I'll return to
Journey by Moonlight and probably to
The Third Tower too. Like both of those books (the first a novel, the second a memoir),
Oliver VII takes place mainly in Italy – clearly Szerb had an affection for the country, and for Venice in particular. It was published in 1942, while war was well underway throughout Europe. The book takes place before the war when, as the reader is reminded several times by the otherwise distant third person narrator, things were quite different.
The titular Oliver VII is the young king of a fictional country whose entire economy is based on sardines and wine (the flag, which I would love to see, is two gold sardines on a silver ground). Bored and wishing to escape his duties, while also saving his country from being sold to a financier who markets innovations*, he stages a coup and escapes to Venice, where he falls in with a group of swindlers. Through a series of unexpected events, Oliver ends up impersonating himself in what is intended to be a quick money-making scam, but turns into something else entirely.
I find Szerb's story so heartbreaking, and the fact that his writing is so lively and funny somehow makes it more heartbreaking still. When I first opened Oliver VII and saw the full page author photo facing the title page, I was gripped with sadness. I said something similar when I wrote about The Queen's Necklace, but I wonder how it could be that Szerb spent the war years writing – and not just writing, but writing this. His world was ending, and I wish I could know what he was thinking.
* The day I started
Oliver VII was also the day this
much ridiculed twitter thread on Web3 was posted and of course I saw parallels. Szerb's financier would certainly be a crypto bro in 2022.
