A Power Built on Lies

Cory Oldweiler reviews Hungarian author Krisztina Tóth’s novel “Eye of the Monkey,” newly translated by Ottilie Mulzet.

By Cory OldweilerNovember 26, 2025

• Fiction

IN VÁCLAV HAVEL’S seminal 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, the actor, dissident, and future president of both Czechoslovakia and the subsequent Czech Republic lays out the dynamics of dissent under authoritarianism. Though he was specifically concerned with the Soviet Bloc governments that would crumble in less than a dozen years, many of his observations broadly apply to other iterations of totalitarianism, all of which depend on deceit: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.” Simply by living inside this lie, Havel continues (in Paul Wilson’s English-language translation), everyday citizens are co-opted to the cause. “They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system.” These authoritarian systems manipulate the present by controlling access—to information, to opportunity, to security—and fabricate the future via the fantastical promises of ideology. But attending to the past proves trickier because it has verifiably occurred, is remembered, and has been documented. And so the past must be obliterated.

Hungarian author Krisztina Tóth’s 2022 novel Eye of the Monkey, newly translated into English by Ottilie Mulzet, focuses on three people reckoning with traces of their past under a system determined to keep its citizens credulously and contentedly ensconced within its lies. Dr. Kreutzer is a psychiatrist whose success is partly tied to a decades-long relationship with the ruling strongman identified only as “the Regent.” Giselle is a university professor whose desire to escape the trauma of her past and the ennui of her present finds an outlet in her relationship with Kreutzer. And Albert is an orphan whose day-to-day scrabble for subsistence is buoyed by a belief that Giselle is his mother. The novel’s title refers to a 1970 experiment in which a new head was successfully transplanted onto a rhesus monkey, which sounds like a scene straight out of a low-budget horror film. Along with the many ethical considerations of such a procedure, debate centered on whether the new monkey retained any of its original self—its soul, if you will—after the transplant, which is an apt metaphor for life under a totalitarian power that seeks to replace free will with official lies masquerading as truth.

The New University, where Giselle teaches, is on the front lines of the Unified Regency’s disinformation campaign. “We crammed our students’ heads with lies, in the best case half-truths, and were horrified if they asked any questions,” she explains. Her personal life is built on lies as well—she is no longer attracted to her much older husband and feels wedded to an unfulfilling compromise simply to get through the day: “Never in my life had I felt happy. Not only that, but I also could not even comprehend what others meant by this word.” Kreutzer seemingly offers a way out, until Giselle learns the truth behind his lies. His 10-year marriage fell apart long ago, but he only recently moved out. He keeps up appearances but is also conflicted by any trace of his past. He did not love his elderly mother, who dies early in the novel, and does not relish sorting through her belongings, yet he cannot discard everything he finds there, whether it’s a piece of his childhood “blankie” or a convertible sleeper chair that he never got a chance to use. His attraction to Giselle and any of the other women in his life has nothing to do with them; it is simply his way of exerting power, of creating his own system of oppression. He has lived his whole life in this way, starting with a high school girl he recalls being drawn to as “easy prey.” Kreutzer has slept with “at least a thousand women,” including his mother’s cleaning lady, “who resembled a terminal cancer patient or, even more repulsively, a body exhumed from the grave.” He even casually rapes his wife when he returns to his old apartment to move another load of his stuff to his new apartment.

Interwoven into this timeline are asynchronous glimpses into the lives of Kreutzer and Giselle’s extended family members, along with chapters concerned with seemingly random individuals, such as a man who gets struck by lightning, all of which are eventually incorporated into the main narrative. Both Kreutzer and Giselle have lost siblings who left behind grief that is impregnably linked to the era before civil war gave way to the dictatorial Unified Regency. For Kreutzer, the memory of his nine-year-old brother’s sudden death from meningitis days before Christmas has cast a pall over the holiday for the rest of his life. Giselle’s older sister, Hermina, fled the country with their father after their parents got divorced when the children were barely school-age.

Eye of the Monkey, originally published in Hungarian as A majom szeme, is Tóth’s first novel to be translated into English, coming on the heels of two excellent story collections, Pixel (2011; tr. Owen Good, 2019) and Barcode (2006; tr. Peter Sherwood, 2023). It’s also the first time in her translated work that she has ventured into speculative fiction, in this case a story set in an unnamed city in an unidentified country at an indeterminate point in the near future. As with her two prior books, Tóth adds a bit of structural intrigue to Eye of the Monkey that doesn’t necessarily develop the story itself but expands the way in which a reader can think about what they are reading. In Pixel, this is achieved by naming each chapter with a part of the body (“The Neck’s Story,” “The Chin’s Story,” etc.); in Barcode, each story is subtitled with a type of line (“Blood Line,” “Bikini Line,” and so on). In Eye of the Monkey, chapter titles are all phrases snipped from the text of the novel, such as “it was dark, completely dark” and “visible from up close.” When those phrases appear in a story, they are set in boldface, lending a kind of yarn-wall framework to the book by lexically depicting the manner in which ideas are interconnected throughout our lives. In a bit of a baffling inelegance, however, two of these 43 chapter titles make a third, non-bolded appearance in the text, while the other 41 only appear twice, once as chapter headings and once within the story. (Both anomalies—“the invisible, thirsty dog” and “delicate and elegant hands”—involve such specific adjectives that the additional appearances are almost certainly part of Tóth’s original text rather than translation choices.)

Mulzet’s translation is unsurprisingly skillful throughout, particularly in portraying the almost clinical coldness of Kreutzer, no matter how monstrous he is behaving, and capturing the immediacy of Giselle’s episodes, which are the only parts of the novel told in the first person. The translation really shines in those moments when Tóth stylistically lets loose in relatively lengthy run-on passages, including one scene in which Giselle castigates herself and another time when Kreutzer fantasizes about all the women he has controlled. These moments recall the conclusion of “Insulated Floor (Transport Line Tickets)” (in Barcode), as well as Mulzet’s award-winning translations of the notoriously twisty, never-ending sentences of László Krasznahorkai. Another moment that demonstrates Mulzet’s instinct, creativity, and experience comes when Giselle tells Kreutzer that she and her husband no longer have a “conjugal relationship,” a term that makes her think of “congealed grease.” I highly doubt that conjugal and congealed sound as similar in Hungarian as they do in English, meaning this amusing wordplay was crafted by Mulzet, a perfect example of one of the many things AI translation will never be able to achieve.

Though the civil war itself is never explained, the stratified society left in its wake is recognizable from dictatorships past and present. Travel abroad is prohibited, except for certain strata of society. State-supported theaters stage mainly “boring propaganda.” Journalists prefer to write about “topics that sustai[n] interest and whi[p] up passion.” People who are about to die are wheeled to hospital basements where they are forced to sign confessions of their alleged crimes. The city has closed districts, which are dangerous, run-down areas with few businesses and no access to public transportation, as well as protected districts, which have better stores and more secure, attractive homes but still experience occasional electrical outages at night.

The Regent himself is insecure about his height and afraid of flying, traits that evoke Vladimir Putin, and plagued by paranoid delusions that made me think of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, among many others. And though the Regent sits atop the power structure—a transplanted monkey head—that edifice is multitiered. Kreutzer also wields a tremendous amount of control—over Giselle, over his wife, over the other women he dates and abuses, as well as over his patients, whose secrets he is privy to. But power built on lies is illusory.

Giselle is brought down because she can’t find anyone else who believes in the power of the truth, and so she blames herself for her desire “to know, to see, to read what [she] never should have known, seen, or read.” But despite her failure, the lie catches up to Kreutzer, and the Regency itself too, in the form of a catastrophic situation born of incompetence. That truth can’t be admitted no matter the cost, because “such a response would imply the Unified Regency had committed an error,” and so the only answer is to double down on misinformation. If there is a glimmer of hope in the novel’s bleak conclusion, it is that, as Havel observed, individuals are the system. At some point, when enough of them are lost, the system will fail, and those who are left behind will have an opportunity to start again.