Krisztina Tóth Discusses Eye of the Monkey

Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoized.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being followed by a young man for weeks, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own.

In Tóth’s deftly woven, polyphonic, and dystopian novel—full of twists, turns, and treachery—we plumb the depths of a fractured, disturbed, and isolated society, as well as the underbelly of social perversions such a society produces. In this intricate web, stories within stories reveal the complicated lives of women and men who struggle to negotiate the networks of power and poverty that have shaped their lives and their relationships to one another.

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Krisztina Tóth is one of the most popular and best known Hungarian authors. She studied sculpting and literature in Budapest and spent two years in Paris during her university years. The recipient of numerous awards, she is the author of many children’s books, novels, and poetry collections. In 2015, her novel Aquarium was featured on the shortlist of the German Internationaler Literaturpreis. Her works have been translated into twenty languages, among them Arabic, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish. Photo credit Kinga Varga

 

 

 

 

Ottilie Mulzet has translated over seventeen volumes of Hungarian poetry & prose, including works by Szilárd Borbély, László Krasznahorkai, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, Krisztina Tóth, Edina Szvoren, and others. Her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming was awarded the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature.