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The title of Hungarian author Krisztina Tóth’s new novel, Eye of the Monkey, refers to a 1970 experiment which resulted in the first successful simian head transplant. “The monkey seemed to sense its surroundings,” the narrator tells us, “its gaze conveying near human feeling.” There is a double grotesqueness here: the suffering being inflicted upon the creature in a truly stomach-churning act; and the suffering from within — the monkey’s awareness of the horror of its situation, of displacement, disembodiment and alienation.
The characters in the novel — Tóth’s first to be published in English even though she is one of Hungary’s most decorated authors — are also afflicted by a kind of double-edged assault. There is a constant, external hum of danger. We are in an unnamed country bearing the hallmarks of autocracy: mass surveillance, the collapse of independent journalism, a paranoid leader, the ghettoisation of the poor. Even nature appears as part of the oppressive apparatus, with clouds trying to “grab onto the earth”. Tóth’s prose — translated by Ottilie Mulzet, longtime collaborator of Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai — is choppy and prone to sudden gear shifts, but like the surveillance state it describes, it misses nothing.
And then there is their inner turmoil — Tóth’s characters are all in the midst of crisis, experiencing loss, confusion, ennui. Persecuted from the outside and from within, there is a claustrophobic mood to the book as the thin protective film between the internal and the external is torn away.
It is notable how many times the word “contours” occurs, as if Tóth is drawing our attention to the problem of their absence, to what happens when the boundaries between one another, between truth and artifice, between freedom and compulsion, become impossible to discern. Even the contours of the book’s architecture are unsettled, as each of the poetic chapter headings sneak in to the actual prose itself.
This existential pondering is made legible through the interconnected stories of Giselle, a professor, and Mihály Kreutzer, a psychiatrist, who are both going through personal upheavals. Giselle seeks out Dr Kreutzer’s guidance and the two become lovers — but this is no story of romance or redemption. One can’t help but think of another Kreutzer as a bad omen — Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata — a novel with a keen sense of the devastating consequences of unchecked desire. When Giselle reads Dr Kreutzer’s notebooks, a darker truth to the nature of their relationship is revealed.
There is, as you have probably gleaned, little to be optimistic about in the book’s dystopian cosmos. But there is great enjoyment to be found in Tóth’s artistry; in the precision of her images (“she got dressed as if she were leaving a gynecological appointment”), in the originality of her characterisation (Giselle’s husband is “the kind of fellow who always knew what the temperature would be that day”). Her characters are flawed, deceitful, contradictory, and yet their undeniable humanity pulls us in. Tóth shows us how private pain is so often behind hurtful acts; Larkin’s refrain “Man hands on misery to man” feels like a silent companion to the book.
The novel ends with a Chernobyl-like disaster that calls into question the state’s bold claims of its glory. There is a gesture here towards justice, of guilty parties facing the truth, but it arrives after too much damage has been done. What we are left with is not only a powerful impression of the alienating effects of authoritarianism, but a cautionary tale about individual self-deception. Eye of the Monkey — both the book and the grotesque tale behind its name — reminds us that true awareness is painful; but what other way is there to live?
Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth, translated by Ottilie Mulzet Seven Stories Press £14.99, 320 pages
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