Book cover: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/flesh/9780224099790
This reader’s impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Flesh
David Szalay
Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 9780224099790
Oh, you know the usual complaints about the books that make it onto the Booker long- and shortlists: too long; too short; way too complicated, way too obtuse; written in such a way that hardly anyone but the author and his or her friends and some of the committee can decipher what on earth any of it is actually supposed to mean. And sometimes there’s some merit in this kind of response, as if there’s something inherently snobbish, elitist and genuinely difficult about grasping and making sense of it all.
If reality comes to us in waves of the overwhelming and the exhausting, not to mention the utterly, utterly alarming – the climate crisis, the complete clusterfuck of poverty and inequality, the still overwhelming task of imagining what comes after relentless, dizzyingly destructive rinse-and-repeat capitalism – what then of Literature with a capital L, the good old “deep” and “thoughtful” literary work with something meaningful to say or diagnose about how we live and relate now? Are you, and you, and you, prepared to read what amounts to a literary autopsy or dissection?
David Szalay might not be all that well known in these parts, but he is an exceptionally accomplished and insightful writer, one specialising in a brand of realism some might even describe as elemental. He’s interested in social relations – in the machinations and filigree of power and how people manage to stay afloat rather than thrive. He is resolutely not the author you read when you want a trauma porn sobfest with epic literary ambitions à la A little life, or a more straightforward rendition of the Bildungsroman. But make no mistake, Szalay is a fine, fine thinker and stylist. It’s this combination of social insight and diagnosis, and his telling, very novelistic literary form that has resulted in Flesh. It’s the most quietly raging book I read in all of 2025.
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It’s this combination of social insight and diagnosis, and his telling, very novelistic literary form that has resulted in Flesh. It’s the most quietly raging book I read in all of 2025.
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This novel has caused a bit of an outcry, due to the fact that (mostly female) readers have viewed it as another tale of toxic masculinity. It has been seen as an overly simplistic and even outright boring book, a novel seemingly obsessed with the body, the carnal and the sexual, at the expense of proper character and plot development. Some even regard Flesh to be, at heart, a deeply misogynistic tale, one that does nothing to move the reader towards a sympathetic reading of or even empathy towards its protagonist, the Hungarian István.
I could easily write an academic essay about what Szalay is doing, at least as I see it, but at the very least I want to reject outright the perspective that Flesh is somehow an entirely inferior, one-dimensional, unaffecting and even dull read. Contrary to some views out there, my experience of this extraordinary novel was one of deep immersion from the get-go.
This is a book about the ways in which our modern world operates. It is a chronicle – with one man at its disaffected core – about the flights, fancies and forces of capital. It is an unmasking, through the seemingly “normal” and “simple”, of the horrors of human relationships that are entirely dictated and directed by the need to influence, control and dominate – in subtle and increasingly less subtle ways. Flesh is about sex and death and loneliness and the deepest, deepest Weltschmertz, but it is told in such a way that the terrors of being disconnected, disillusioned, disaffected and even dead inside appear to be nothing if not more days in life.
Right from the very first page and paragraph up until the novel’s quietly devastating and expertly observed final lines, Flesh is an exercise in subtext. Szalay respects you enough not to treat you like a second-class literary citizen of the world; he doesn’t waste page upon page expanding on the brutal kind of world so many have to live in right now. He knows that he truly doesn’t have to. The perceptive reader, upon closing Flesh, will have witnessed the seemingly utter banality; the episodes that each reveal swathes of time and forms of risk, reward and dissolution; and the ingenious turning inside out of the Bildungsroman and the “‘gangster’/muscle for hire rising above circumstances” trope that Szalay is marking. Note how time is stripped away, despite the forward pull and momentum on display.
Note how the repetitive nature of István’s interactions, especially with women; the lack of concrete detail about his person and especially his inner life; and the text’s choice of language and lexicon, all conspire to confront the reader with an exercise in the supposed “anti-affect”.
Conversations right throughout the novel present as ongoing inquiries into how people continuously misunderstand and lose one another, how our language fails us, how our obsession with accumulation and novelty means that people can very well be reduced to even less than objects. They can become human beings unable to relate or converse or engage in intimacy in ways that engender even the tiniest bit of connection, warmth, mutual respect or appreciation.
For István, there is an increasingly disturbing and eventually heartbreaking concretisation of being a pawn in other people’s games and follies. From teen to incarcerated young man to soldier to muscle to security and driver to property developer, husband and father, István remains the son of a mother who is fundamentally absent, neglectful and nefarious.
In a novel that is in part about a world ruled by predation and violence – whether this violence is structural, interpersonal, linguistic or epistemological – the fundamental rupture is between human beings and themselves, and this then spreads to others. And, tellingly, this extreme violence most often happens offscreen, making it all the more dizzying and horrifying.
Szalay digs his fingers into the wounded, corpulent flesh of a society that has become all too comfortable turning away from the face of the other. It’s no accident that István is the personification of flesh as actant, doing a tremendous amount and moving spatially as well as socially, but inevitably coming to a great fall. The novel comes full circle. In Szalay’s version of a picaresque novel, he brilliantly and unsurprisingly features István in various states of transit and positioned in terms of his isolation. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Novelty doesn’t exist in a world where everything and especially everyone can be bought.
And this is, I feel, the calmly dropped bombshell of this book. Rarely, if ever, has a novel laid bare in such an unfettered way how unbearable and costly our attempts at belonging, social acceptance and the desire for meaning have become. It’s as if the price of knowing what it means to mean something to someone is always impossibly high. Note how the characters destroy themselves through substance abuse and alcohol, erotic obsessions and the pursuit of wealth – but also through inaction, inertia and moral paralysis.
Profound, then, is the consistent, unfailing background – one where the author does indeed utilise fitting, poetic, lyrical and even expensive description, all while keeping to the stripped-down aesthetic – of nature and the seasons. The nature of modern man, and his unmooring from the natural world, become grandly illuminated. But you might miss the artistry at work here if you’re not careful and attuned to what’s happening.
The words “weird” and “OK” are employed to a startling degree throughout, signifying the essential misalignment and disaffection between these human beings on even the most basic questions and topics of inquiry. “Weird” becomes the commonplace for difference and forms of lack, while “OK” – omnipresent, relentlessly flattening out and stripping away – accumulates to an eventual undoing of literally every character who utters the phrase. No one is OK; no one has escaped from this hellscape to tell the tale. Except for István. No spoilers, of course, but the ending is somehow entirely shattering and perfectly, plausibly matter of fact.
How very telling is this detail, playing out in its various devastating ironies and injuries. In Hungarian, “István” (with the accent) is the equivalent of the English name Stephen, meaning "crown", "garland" or "wreath". It is derived from the Greek Stephanos and holds great significance due to Hungary's first king, Saint Stephen (Szent István). It signifies honour, victory and leadership, and it is a very common and historic name in Hungary.
Saint Stephen I, the first Christian king of Hungary, established the nation and Christianity there, making the name a symbol of Hungarian statehood and faith. I won’t do more than point out that the protagonist in this story is fittingly removed from statehood, nationhood and a religious or even secular kind of faith.
I can’t help but feel that there is some kind of deep connective tissue between Szalay’s Flesh and a very different yet seemingly connected South African novel, Wolf, wolf by Eben Venter. Venter recently listed Flesh as one of his best reads of 2025. Indeed, there is something similarly mesmerising, disturbing and unsettling about how both writers flesh out their male protagonists. Szalay does it through the aforementioned anti-interiority and carnal confinement, as it were, and Venter homes in on the estrangement, vulnerability, violence and dissolution – a kind of eventual existential “rewilding” – experienced by his Mattheus Duiker. “Mattie” is a complex and deeply troubled man in his thirties who is gay. He is entangled in a porn addiction and a troubled relationship with his partner, and he is a man who is conflicted and compromised regarding his relationship to traditional/Afrikaner masculinity and fraught family dynamics. There’s an illuminating potential conversation between Flesh and Wolf, wolf, I’m sure of it.
István. The king without a crown. He is. We are.
If you’ve read the novel or if you’re planning to, do note the following: Several characters, starting with István himself in an illicit relationship, proclaim their love for another. What the other person says in return in each instance is the most crystalline key to unlocking this immense novel’s call to action. Flesh, Booker winner, strips away its surface, only to reveal astonishing depths below.
How deep are you willing to go?
Kommentaar
Inderdaad 'n boeiende verhaal! Ongelukkig is daar na my mening 'n aantal tekortkomings. Voorop staan die seks-beheptheid van István: byna elke vrou wat hy mee te doen kry, loop deur, al is is net in sy gedagtes, dit word herhalend en met oorbodige detail beskryf wat my hoop op die ontwikkeling en insig van István soos wat hy ouer geword het, verydel het. In teenstelling daarmee is die dialoog tussen die karakters irriterend karig, indien nie by tye totaal onsinnig nie, en dra dit glad nie by om die karakters meer 'flesh' te gee nie. Uiteraard vervlak dit die roman in belangrike opsigte. Natuurlik is dit vir die leser om afleidings en aanvullings uit die gegewe te maak, maar dáárvoor moet daar tog 'n onderbou bestaan.
Tóg was die roman die lees werd: die verloop van die verhaal word behendig hanteer, en laat heelwat stof tot nadenke daar.