The book is not a traditional novel, but rather a postmodern one without any single narrative. Instead, it is made up of short pieces – anecdotes, jokes, ironic observations, maxims, and brief reflections. Therefore, these fragments don’t form one continuous plot. They connect loosely, creating a kind of textual web where meanings appear, disappear, and reappear in different places. This structure resembles a “rhizome”. It spreads horizontally, without a clear center or hierarchy. This kind of arrangement may reflect the uncertainty and disorientation that people often feel under authoritarian regimes, where public truths shift constantly, and private thought becomes unstable. The book is divided into four major sections:

1. (egy Pobjeda hátsó ülésén) This first section sets the tone of the entire book. It blends everyday scenes with symbolic, and often funny images, many of which play on the idea of power entering the private sphere. The Pobjeda – a car model strongly associated with the socialist period – becomes a metaphorical space where authority and intimacy, the public and the private collide. These opening fragments introduce the book’s focus on how political pressure can infiltrate personal experience, often in subtle or bodily ways. It also introduces many of the motifs and aspects that give the book its ironic title. The scenes in this part frequently use a seemingly erotic or intimate setting, but the “pornographic” quality does not lie in literal sexuality. Instead, it has to do something with the way power intrudes into the private, even physical sphere, turning personal moments into something exposed and politically manipulated. It is a symbol of a vehicle representing power and surveillance, yet the stories place the reader in its back seat, a space where the boundaries between public and personal become blurred. The writing touches on bodies, gazes, gestures, and physical connections, but always with a twist; what should be intimate becomes politically loaded.

2. (anekdot) The second section is built from a chain of anecdotes and brief narrative scenes, loosely connected stories – jokes, snippets of dialogue, overheard remarks – that together form a mosaic of everyday life under authoritarian rule. These anecdotes don’t build toward a single narrative but show how people learn to speak indirectly in a system where open expression is risky. The sudden shifts in tone, unfinished thoughts, ellipses, and contradictions resemble the coded, super-cautious communication typical of oppressive environments. At the same time, the anecdotes quietly attempt to undermine official ideology by juxtaposing political clichés with ordinary frustrations, exposing how hollow those slogans sound in real life. In a way, humor becomes both a coping mechanism and a form of resistance, while the repeated use of ready-made phrases reveals how deeply the regime’s language seeps into daily thinking. Its political edge is further sharpened by the way many figures in the text feel interchangeable with real people from the Kádár era, giving the prose a combinatorial quality in which historical and contemporary identities may slide into one another. At times, this creates playful irony, as a name like “Mátyás” can evoke both an ordinary character, the leader of the regime and the legendary “Mátyás the Just,” making the overlap between past and present both humorous and revealing. So the phrase here “little Hungarian” adds an ironic twist to “Ponography”, pointing to the particularities of Hungarian history, the recurring patterns of dominance and resistance, from earlier conflicts like the kuruc–labanc divide to the authoritarian systems of the twentieth century.

3. („?”) In the third part, marked only with a question mark, Esterházy focuses on questions with no clear answers, so to speak, rhetorical questions: questions about truth, responsibility, complicity, and the limits of speaking under political pressure. Instead of offering explanations, the text moves through a series of hesitations, interruptions, and contradictions that reflect a world where clear statements are dangerous, and clarity itself becomes suspect. The “?” signals a gap in meaning. It is a place where language breaks down or turns back on itself, mirroring the experience of individuals forced to navigate between what can be said and what must be concealed. This section makes visible the silent spaces created by authoritarian control, showing how uncertainty becomes a form of everyday existence and also erodes one’s sense of agency.

4. (a lélek mérnöke) The final section takes its title from the old Soviet, supposedly Stalinist expression for writers as “engineers of the human soul.” Esterházy uses this phrase ironically. Instead of offering clear and straightforward ideological messages, this part is full of witty remarks, reflections, and observations about the limits and possibilities of language. It constructs a poetic tool, which may help us recognize that literature cannot solve political pressures, but is able to expose how those pressures work — primarily through language. This closing section ties the book back to its central theme and makes a recursive reading attitude possible: the struggle over who gets to shape meaning in a controlled society.

So, this fragmented structure of the book carries a quietly political resonance. In a way, this is a piece of literature that constantly interrupts itself, doubling back, commenting on its own sentences, and opening new poetical-rhetorical possibilities. Hence, this refusal to be pinned down (and also the refusal of how totalitarian systems tend to impose a single, fixed narrative on their citizens)  is able to act as a quiet form of resistance. It challenges the rigid, formulaic, dogmatic, and often considered dull style of speech that dominated the Rákosi era, with its slogans and repeated ideological phrases. In a system that demands verbal obedience, a text that keeps breaking its own rules becomes a way of reclaiming freedom. So this style seems to say that language doesn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t belong only to the state. Therefore, it is alive, flexible, combinatorial, and always capable of slipping out of control.

The book nonetheless connects its political tuning to a broader tradition in Hungarian literature that uses disruption and stylistic experimentation to expose how ideology shapes everyday life. Earlier modernist and avant-garde writers also tried to strip out ordinary language of its usual associations and reveal the hidden assumptions behind it. Esterházy continues this tradition but adds some postmodern elements. His novel, all in all, draws attention not only to what is being said, but to how language itself works, and who gets to define its meaning.

Related organisations: 

Hungarian Working People’s Party (MDP) – ruling party of the Rákosi era

State Protection Authority (ÁVH) – political police and key institution of surveillance and repression

Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People’s Republic – central organ of political decision-making

Related events: 

Rákosi era (1947/49–1953/56) – a period of Stalinist dictatorship, political terror, and ideological rigidity

Collectivisation and nationalisation campaigns (1949–1961) – structural transformation of society and property

Activities of the ÁVH (1950s) – surveillance, interrogations, thought control

Post-war population displacements and social restructuring – shaping the family histories (also) evoked in the book

Related people:

1. Mátyás Rákosi: General Secretary and leader of the Hungarian Working People’s Party; central figure of the Stalinist dictatorship whose political practices (surveillance, ideological coercion, linguistic control) form the novel’s primary historical backdrop.
2. Ernő Gerő: key architect of the Rákosi-era political apparatus; emblematic figure of rigid ideological enforcement and the state’s intrusion into private life.
3. Imre Nagy: reformist communist and later Prime Minister; his political stance represents the historical alternative to Rákosi’s totalitarian model and frames the broader conflict within 1950s Hungary.
4. József Révai: Minister of Culture and chief ideologue of the period; instrumental in shaping the cultural and linguistic strategies of the regime, including censorship and the manipulation of public discourse—central themes that resonate with the novel’s focus on political language.
5. László Rajk: prominent communist politician and victim of a major show trial (1949); his fate symbolizes the Rákosi-era mechanisms of fabricated accusations, fear, and political paranoia—structural forces the novel indirectly evokes. 

Related geographical points or zones:

Budapest – primary cultural and mental landscape implied in the text

Hungarian People’s Republic – political framework of the Rákosi era

Eastern Bloc / Eastern Europe – broader context of totalitarian political structures

Central Europe – relevant for long-term cultural patterns such as the kuruc/labanc divide