Variously Hideous: On Krisztina Tóth’s “Eye of the Monkey”

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I had never read a Krisztina Tóth novel before, and, unless you read Hungarian, German, Chinese, Macedonian, or Czech, neither had you: Eye of the Monkey is Tóth’s first novel to appear in English. It is not only her longform fiction that has taken its time, either, as it is only since the 2010s that her critically acclaimed poetry and prose have made their way to an Anglophone audience. But such translational scotomae, particularly when it comes to Central and Eastern European writers, have an odd precedent. Magda Szabó was history’s most-translated Hungarian author, and yet her novel The Door (1987), despite the currency of its unflinching feminist reckoning with the relationship between women’s labor and art, did not appear in English for eight years after its initial publication. It then resonated little with English-language readers until a 2005 reissue, two years before the author’s death. More recently, Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night has resurfaced: the novel was first published in her native Polish in 1998, then in English in 2002, but was allowed to go out of print and stay there until its republication in 2025. This seems strange considering the first translation’s robust sales and positive reviews, including one in which a broadsheet reviewer correctly guessed Tokarczuk would later be awarded a Nobel prize. 

It would be easy to dismiss such a slow percolation of these works through an Anglophone readership as the result of tedious bureaucratic and administrative processes and an overlong chain of operations. These things take time. Although in publication terms, four years from initial print run to republication in another territory, let alone in another language, is actually very speedy. Why then, since English-language readers and critics alike have historically been receptive to works in translation, should certain works disappear in English, or certain authors take so long to appear at all? 

Words like “cost” and “risk” land with a thud. According to a European Commission report on publishing, in 2004, the number of European works translated into English began to fall rather than rise: due to EU expansion and the entry of previously uninvolved intermediaries into the market, prices for translation rights rose, and so the financial risk of publishing literary or lesser-known authors also increased. A 2009 report found the UK and France to be “most difficult to be penetrated by translations,” noting ruefully that “not a single writer from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, or Serbia [had] entered the top segment [of best-seller lists] in the ‘West’, as if 1989 had never happened.” And so what looks at a glance like bizarre editorial oversight, or a disinterest of readers in general, is more attributable to pernicious market forces, costs driven ruthlessly up by middlemen, who have squeezed new EU entrants for whatever financial and cultural capital they’ve got.

In the last decade or so a new inroad has opened, however, in the form of new independent presses. Where traditional commercial publishers are risk-averse and jumpy, newer labor-of-love outfits work from principles of value over cost. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these arriviste translators are American: unlike their Western European cousins, who are nothing if not famous for their snobbery (trust me, I’m English), the raison d’être of US publishers like Deep Vellum, its subsidiary Dalkey Archive, and Seven Stories, is to openly welcome writing from the world over. And their attitude is catching: op-eds embracing the “difficulty” of novels not in English now abound; the 2025 International Booker longlist featured the highest ever number of independent publishers, twelve of its thirteen titles coming from independent presses. Tóth—to return finally to the subject of this review—is also a beneficiary of this development: Eye of the Monkey was published by Seven Stories UK, an arm of the US indie publisher since 2016. Perhaps under such auspices things will improve for writers historically excluded from English-language markets, who previously may have been limited to languages not spoken by many readers internationally; perhaps Tóth is in no need of upstart American translators. Regardless of how Tóth lately finds her way into print in English, however, an English-language readership is all the richer for her presence. 

Eye of the Monkey is a darkly thrilling gaze into a totalitarian near-future. The shadowy Unified Regency has seized control of an unnamed European country after a brutal civil war, dividing its capital city into “protected” and “segregated” zones, constantly surveilling its newly impoverished population. Daily life in the regime: a colluding psychiatrist coercively sleeps with his patients; new university recruits are promised “glittering advancement and a secure future” if they engage in state propaganda, “mobiliz[ing] a maximum of people online to verbal attack”; bewildered elderly hospital patients are taken to a basement to participate in sinister “book signings,” where they are forced to “append […] their signatures to long, detailed confessions of crimes.” A hospital orderly who administrates such procedures, himself a resident of one of the city’s crime-ridden segregated areas, is quick even in his recollections to mention that the signings are “voluntary.” These various and variously hideous aspects of the regime are at first background noise to the relationships of the novel’s wide cast of characters, but suffuse its atmosphere with menace. 

And while the novel is not life-writing, and Tóth claiming that to write directly about Hungary’s political landscape is “more the task of a journalist,” it is clearly based on recent political upheavals, those clearly taking place in Hungary: the novel’s characters have Hungarian names, the city is obviously a broken Budapest, and the state’s controls over its citizens are directly analogous to the corrupt and censorious Orbán regime. It is also impossible not to read the daily degradations the novel describes as too far removed from Tóth’s own experience. A self-described exile, she fled Hungary after a public smear campaign was launched against her, for the “crime” of suggesting the introduction of certain inclusive books into schools’ curricula, and the removal of more regressive others. Defamatory articles were written about her in the state-controlled press, after which she received threatening mail, was verbally abused in the street; one morning she opened her mailbox to find it stuffed full of dog shit. In such light, the surveillances and intrusions that the novel’s characters endure have a particularly sinister resonance.

Certain early reviews of the novel complain that Eye of the Monkey fails to reconcile its disparate events, and it is true that we firstly only glimpse the Unified Regency’s regime through its formerly-bourgeois, middle-aged subjects. They seem only to work tiredly in offices, divorcedly pack up boxes. Yet while similarities between characters’ pasts make their stories somewhat difficult to distinguish, this is not a failure of cohesion. Rather, the concussed atmosphere produced by the way these stories intermingle, a permanent feeling of having awoken in confusion, is exactly apposite for a population emerging into a new and terrifying political landscape. What are the rules of reality, now? And if you do not know exactly how you are permitted to behave within the bounds of new and intenebrated laws, how then can you have relationships, even relate to yourself? The novel’s style furthers its disquiet. The narrative’s grammatical persons frequently change, as one character’s memories are interrupted by those of another; the typeset’s propensity for emboldening phrases, seemingly at random, and then using them later as chapter headings, only reinforces a sense that the borders of the text are being stalked by something incomprehensible and menacing.

Horror is kept at bay, and then it isn’t. It takes over a third of the novel’s three hundred page-count for any concrete details of the Unified Regency’s regime to emerge, but when they do, the novel’s atmosphere of pressing disquiet metastasizes into all-consuming panic. Gizella, a patient drawn into an affair with the psychiatrist, Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, discovers that he not only sexually coerces his patients—often manipulating them into believing they are in love with him—but also has those who resist him permanently committed to closed psychiatric wards. Kreutzer’s ex-wife Petra dispassionately recounts how one patient, wrongfully sectioned after attempting to escape the doctor’s advances, “can’t even chew her own food now from all the tranquilizers.” And the doctor is only a symptom of such brutality: through orderlies, bureaucrats, and victims, we learn of people being disappeared, kidnapped, even being given false memories. After so much occlusion, the effect of this sudden rush of revelations is genuinely horrifying. Ironically, however, such details are not simply elucidating. The more we learn about the Unified Regency’s despotic power the less we know, precisely because we discover that we never in the first place knew who was safe; Tóth masterfully balances revealing the full scale of her nightmare in such a way that we not only don’t find our footing again, but learn that we were unbalanced to begin with. And the novel’s conclusion is particularly breathtaking not because Tóth’s shocks are in any way gratuitous, but because we are  denied any possibility of consolation. It would be facile to conclude by inviting a comparison between the administration of works in translation with that of Tóth’s fictionalised regime. To bemoan a writer’s work being “delayed” in its arrival in English is also to center arbitrarily the Anglophone in literary discourses: I’m reminded of the way in which medieval English writers often thought of all speech as flowing from the site of Christ’s ministry; in secular terms our thinking can be at times just as prejudiced. What Eye of the Monkey does offer, however, is a pointed reminder of how administrative systems shape what can be said, and circulated, whether through manipulations of information, capital, or human beings. This  bleak yet deceptively propulsive novel makes newly visible ways in which people can be controlled, and the psychic cost of living under such conditions.