An NYRB Classics Original <br> <br> Venice between the wars, a Hungarian couple on their honeymoon. But “Venice is where the trouble began”—where Miha´ly finds that he prefers wandering backalleys to the company of his bride, Erzsi. In Ravenna they are interrupted at an outdoor cafe´ by a man who zooms up on a motorcycle. It is a man from Miha´ly’s past, with a mysterious grudge and an inexplicable demand: that Miha´ly seek out a friend of their childhood who had been spotted in a procession of monks. Outside of Florence, Miha´ly fails to board the train that is to carry him and Erzsi to Rome. Thus begins Miha´ly’s odyssey through the cities and countryside of Italy and back through the youth that haunts him. Here he is reunited with a charismatic sister and brother, E´va and Tama´s, whose strange amateur theatricals have left sex and death forever linked in Miha´ly’s mind; Ervin, a rival for E´va’s love and a Jew turned Catholic monk; and the man on the motorcycle, Ja´nos.<br><br>Antal Szerb’s dreamlike story is a reckoning with freedom and responsibility, the pulls of love and destruction, and the ways that the past returns to be relived or rejected.