A train bringing an outside force of rabble rousers, led by a mysterious Prince, can be construed as a figure for a totalitarian ideology being pushed on Hungary from the outside.

Likewise the villainous Mrs. Eszter, who controls the town under the auspices of fighting off the mysterious combatants, can herself be read in terms of a critique of totalitarian ideology.

James Wood of The New Yorker wrote in 2011: "The Melancholy of Resistance is a comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn't even turn up for the exam.

Wood continued: "The Melancholy of Resistance is a demanding book, and a pessimistic one, too, since it seems to take repeated ironic shots at the possibility of revolution.

The pleasure of the book, and a kind of resistance, as well, flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness.