Latest news with #István
Chicago Tribune
19-04-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: David Szalay's novel ‘Flesh' has an approach I wouldn't have thought would work
Within the first 20 pages of David Szalay's new novel, 'Flesh,' I knew that I would be writing about the book, but I truthfully had no clue what I might have to say. Several days after finishing the novel, I find myself in the same state of mind, which is a testament to the novel's unusual approach, and because of that approach, its haunting power. 'Flesh' is the story of István, who we first meet as an adolescent having moved to a new town in Hungary, where he lives in a small apartment with his mother. Adrift like many young teen males, István is — in a way — seduced by his married neighbor and begins a sexual relationship with her. István is not even particularly attracted to the neighbor, but the power of his sexual desire, particularly in the absence of attraction, is both interesting and impossible to resist. After the neighbor's husband discovers the affair, István kills the man accidentally as part of a scuffle on the apartment building stairs. He goes to juvenile jail, and once freed, enlists in the Hungarian army, where he winds up experiencing combat — including the death of a friend — in the Iraq war. The rest of the novel unfolds with István's fortunes (literally and figuratively) improving. He moves to London and finds work as a bouncer and then is recruited by a private security company, eventually getting steady work as a live-in driver for a wealthy couple with a young son. Throughout his journey, István, despite lacking any kind of apparent charm, or even intention at seduction, is irresistible to a series of women, the pattern started with his next-door neighbor repeating. This includes the wife of the wealthy couple, much younger than her husband, and frequently shepherded around London and its country environs by István. She initiates an affair, later conducted with increasing openness. István, both vicariously and then directly, is given access to a life of great material privilege, a condition to which he takes with seeming comfort, but also without apparent pleasure. I'll leave off the narrative summary there because what Szalay unfurls next generates some surprising and satisfying tension, but the intrigue of this novel goes well beyond its plot. What's most fascinating to me as the reader is that Szalay has deliberately removed one of the most potent tools in the novelist's shed, the ability to render a character's interiority — their thoughts, feelings, worries and excitements — in exchange for an exceedingly spare accounting of István's life. The most frequently used word is 'OK,' mostly coming from István in response to something another character has said. We know that he has been through trauma — he sees a therapist for PTSD after his military service — but we are given no insights into how István feels about any of this. He is stimulated by the sex, but what goes beyond or gets underneath this stimulation is never explored. Other events that would be objectively devastating happen and then are put behind him as life inexorably moves on. At first, these authorial choices rankled, I thought something was missing, but as I kept reading, I fell in with Szalay's approach and found myself more and more invested in István, and as the novel heads toward a fateful choice we are, in a way, aching for him, even though we hardly know him. I'm not sure I would've believed novels can work this way, but as I remain haunted by the book and eager to have others check it out, I recognize that with 'Flesh,' Szalay has done something quite special. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'The Last Amateurs' by John Feinstein 2. 'The Passengers' by John Marrs 3. 'Stoner' by John Edward Williams 4. 'The Color of Law' by Richard Rothstein 5. 'Real Americans' by Rachel Khong — Luca W., Chicago It's the inclusion of 'Stoner' here that makes me want to recommend a novel that's very different, but also, for some reason, provided a similar kind of impact on me: 'The Italian Teacher' by Tom Rachman. 1. 'Blaze Me a Sun' by Christoffer Carlsson 2. 'The Fox Wife' by Yangsze Choo 3. 'Possession' by A.S. Byatt 4. 'In the Distance' by Hernan Diaz 5. 'White Noise' by Don DeLillo — Christine C., Skokie For Christine, I want a book with a bit of postmodern gamesmanship without being too heavy-handed about it. How about Colson Whitehead's debut novel? 'The Intuitionist.' 1. 'What Does it Feel Like' by Sophie Kinsella 2. 'The Ride of Her Life' by Elizabeth Letts 3. 'Headshot' by Rita Bullwinkel 4. 'The Cliffs' by J. Courtney Sullivan 5. 'Here One Moment' by Liane Moriarty — Rita A., Naperville Rita needs something with enough snap to the story to keep things moving: 'Such a Fun Age' by Kiley Reid.
Wall Street Journal
10-04-2025
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: ‘Flesh' by David Szalay
The feeling of unease begins with the title in David Szalay's 'Flesh.' Flesh is something different from skin, more elemental and purely physical (its Spanish translation, carne, is also the word for meat). The word suggests cravings and appetites, and it carries an inescapable association with sin. Dangerously, flesh can seem to have a will of its own, leading to the unsettling discovery, as the man at the center of Mr. Szalay's novel puts it, 'that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing.' That man, called István, is introduced to us as a teenager, living in a housing bloc in Hungary in the late 1980s. When he is 15, a middle-aged neighbor grooms and seduces him, then breaks things off when István becomes too attached. Desperate to see her, he tussles with her husband, who falls down a flight of stairs and dies. Such is István's initiation into the violence of desire. What puzzles him, however, is his detachment from his own actions. Of his part in the husband's death, he thinks only that 'it's hard to say what his intention was.' This laconic estrangement persists as Mr. Szalay follows István's life over the next 30-some years. He serves time in juvenile detention and then enlists in the Hungarian army. He moves to London and finds work in private security, where he falls into an affair with his wealthy employer's wife. After his employer dies of cancer, István marries his widow and assumes his place in the household, a turn of events—improbable in summary but believable in its particulars—that seems to come about by accident, as though István had no real say in the matter.
Boston Globe
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In David Szalay's ‘Flesh,' a reminder of the body's betrayals
István echoes trivial details of a couple of characters from 'All That Man Is,' particularly the Hungarian tough working in London, but where the two novels truly complement each other is thematically, their protagonists chafing at the course of lives that have proven disappointing in genuinely significant and peevishly trivial ways. But while the men in the earlier novel fixate on what they could be doing or, as they grow older, should have done differently, István never questions the life he's been given or expresses a desire for change. He's aware of feeling dissatisfied, but the only way he acknowledges the helplessness that emotion engenders is by lashing out in anger, which invariably catalyzes changes that he never sought. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up We first meet István in the late 1990s when he's 15. He and his mother have newly relocated to a prefab, concrete apartment block on the outskirts of a southern Hungarian city similar to Pécs, where Szalay, who grew up in London, lived for several years when he started writing. István runs errands for a 42-year-old married neighbor woman who grooms him then initiates an intense sexual relationship. The boy soon believes he's fallen in love, but she dismisses such childish notions, triggering an outburst that lands István in a juvenile institution. We next see him as an aimless 18-year-old with 'an aptitude for fighting.' He's helping transport drugs from Croatia until his new crush, Noémi, rejects him despite her 'reputation' for getting around, sending István into a spiral of self-pity and the open arms of the army. His five-year tour, including service in Iraq, saddles István with PTSD. He answers questions with the fewest words necessary and observes the world around him without imposing himself upon it. 'It's like he's waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn't really thinking about the future at all.' He's in a rut, but instead of crawling out, he punches a wall and breaks his hand. Advertisement Something else does find him two years later, in London, where he has been working the door at a strip club. Heading home from work, he interrupts a robbery, rescuing Mervyn, who briefly becomes the Henry Higgins to István's Eliza Doolittle. Under Mervyn's tutelage, the Hungarian learns to 'fit in' among people 'with serious money,' soon landing a live-in job driving for 60-something Karl Nyman and his much younger wife, Helen, with whom István begins an affair. István's interest in Helen is not something he clearly understands. Except for Noémi, he never physically desires the woman he sleeps with, including the neighbor who abused him, who he saw as 'someone old and ugly.' Of Helen, she's not 'particularly attractive, [and] he doesn't even particularly want to have sex with her.' István is merely acting on compulsions that first arose as a boy when he discovered 'the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.' Advertisement István and Helen's relationship plays out in fascinating and unexpected ways over the bulk of the novel, and as he takes on the trappings of this world of privilege, of posh London addresses and sprawling country estates, of Tom Ford suits and Cartier perfume, István changes on the outside but remains at heart that ex-soldier who punched a wall, a representation of, per the Nymans' teenage son, 'a primitive form of masculinity.' But István is not the clichéd cad who sleeps his way through life. He is unquestionably tied to 'all that burgeoning physicality' that emerged early on, but he sees it as a weakness. It 'is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing.' Some may knock István as a passive participant in life, but Szalay portrays him with such compassion that I sympathized with almost every move he made. Near the end of the novel, István remarks that 'There's something terrible about the way normality asserts itself.' If you've ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you'll likely find 'Flesh' all too human. FLESH By David Szalay Scribner, 368 pages, $28.99 Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer. Advertisement
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flesh by David Szalay review – brilliantly spare portrait of a man
Samuel Butler's 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh carried with it an implied subtitle. In the book of Kings, from which Butler drew his title, the dying David tells his son Solomon, 'take thou courage and shew thyself a man'. Butler's inference was clear enough: here is a book about what it means to live, what it means to die, and what might be a worthwhile way to fill the time in between. Flesh, the sixth book from Booker-shortlisted David Szalay, has more than just a biblical allusion in common with Butler's masterpiece. Thrillingly, in an age when we arguably have weaker stomachs for such things, it also shares its bold ontological and artistic ambitions. In Flesh, Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat. The novel recounts the life of István, whom we meet as a psychologically isolated and taciturn teenager and follow until he is a psychologically isolated and taciturn middle-aged man. The intervening years see István pulled along by the undertows of life; an affair with an older neighbour that ends in tragedy and violence, a stretch serving in the military, the uprooting of his life from Hungary to London, a vertiginous climb up the British class strata and, ultimately, a stoic and melancholy return to the town where he grew up. Crucially, there is precisely nothing of the agentive, questing hero in István's journey. Szalay has rendered a man buffeted by forces beyond his control, be they the erotic or material desires of those who surround him, the undulations of the global economy or the interventionist and racialised foreign policy of the European Union. A consistently phlegmatic and passive participant in the events of his life and the events of the wider world, István has something of the existential wayfarer about him – Camus' Meursault meets Forrest Gump. Over the course of the novel, the nature and implications of István's pliability are gradually revealed. He begins with a detached but curious naivety, unsure what pleasures life might bestow on him but willing to silently put one foot in front of the other until he finds out. But over time, this hardens, first into phlegmatic acceptance, and later into an almost eerie resignation. Before long, István seems entirely alienated from his own desires, a ghost haunting the edges of a life that he is not even sure is his. In the hands of a less skilful writer, this might seem a predictable trajectory, the incremental retrenchment of a mind and a heart in the face of pain. But instead, Szalay gives us something far more disquieting: the creeping implication that perhaps István is not engaged in an act of psychospiritual retreat, but is instead reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate's cold indifference. However, the sense of psychological, social and emotional detachment that pervades the novel does have one notable counterweight. From the title on, Szalay ensures the reader never forgets that, for all his otherworldly remove, István exists in a body: while he may not articulate his desires verbally, they nonetheless exist. Whether it be his disfiguring urge for violence, or his disorienting and occasionally ennobling urge for sexual release, it is through these acts, often sudden and shocking, that we get closest to understanding what might lie beneath his silence. It is telling that István seems most energised during the period of his life he spends at war. While his experience is ultimately defined by trauma on the battlefield and the monumental futility of the 'war on terror', we also sense that for István it takes the proximity and imminence of death, the undeniable confrontation with his mortality, to render the world meaningful and vivid. In this sense, Flesh is a novel that frequently reminds us how often motion precedes emotion. Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence but in this novel he has pared things back even more brutally. Over 350 pages or so, the cumulative effect is one of controlled, austere minimalism, a series of thumbnail sketches that suggest precisely the needed amount of detail. Dialogue is handled similarly, staccato exchanges that only rarely erupt into exclamation. When István is asked how it felt to be in the army, to see people die and to shoot a gun, he finally settles on 'it was OK'. At times, Szalay's writing is reminiscent of Henry Green's great modernist trilogy, Loving, Living, Party Going, where stylistic flatness is deployed with an intensity that is almost comic, such that the very idea of meaningful emotional connection is called into question – rendered absurd. There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion In István, Szalay has given us an unusually, confrontationally honest protagonist; one who accepts the vagaries of life as being outside his locus of control, and who says so little because he senses that when all is said and done, words are a woefully inadequate tool for the job. Flesh is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Novelist David Szalay: ‘You can't write like Martin Amis any more'
It's not long before a conversation with David Szalay, the British-Hungarian novelist, veers onto the subject of sex. Specifically sex from a male perspective and, invariably, sex that by turns is adolescent, unthinking, prodigious, loving and rather dreary. Such are the encounters in which his male characters frequently indulge, in novels such as the 2016 Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is, and there are a fair amount of them in his new novel, Flesh. 'I always want to depict sex as honestly as I can, which is something you can't, for instance, do so well on Netflix, because on screen there is only so far you can go,' he says. 'Of course, men engaging in casual sex is no longer allowed to pass without comment. There's no longer that sense that boys will be boys. So I expect the main character in Flesh to draw quite a bit of disapproval.' I'm talking to Szalay in his Vienna apartment, where he lives with his second wife, a German-Hungarian academic, and their two-month-old son. Szalay, a genial 51-year-old, occupies an intriguing position as both a major British writer and one who stands apart from the British literary scene, having lived in Europe for nearly 15 years. He was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father, but grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, moving to the Continent in 2010. A box containing several copies of Flesh arrives during our conversation and he hoicks it up the many flights of stairs in his apartment block with evident delight. A few minutes earlier, we had been talking about an exchange between two characters in a proof copy, which contained the words 'elemental masculinity' and which Szalay has cut from the final draft. He could scribble it back in, I suggest. 'Perhaps. But I think I cut it out because the line felt a bit too obvious.' It's tempting to regard Szalay's novels as some sort of disquisition on the state of modern man. The characters in the interlinked stories of All That Man Is – hormonal students, real-estate developers, suicidal Russian billionaires – are united by anxiety over their position in the world and by an overarching struggle for purpose. A similar desultory restlessness feeds into Flesh, which follows, in colourless prose, the life of a largely monosyllabic working-class Hungarian man, István, as he stumbles from a calamitous teenage affair and a stint in the army into a relationship with the wife of his wealthy employer, great money and power, and an ultimately mutually destructive relationship with his stepson. István, both fool and tragic hero, drifts through life rather than actively pursuing it, although such is Szalay's structural deftness that the novel's sly drip-feed of information forces us to reappraise repeatedly what we think of him. Often, it is left to the reader to decode the flattened surfaces and toneless dialogue. 'What happened?' asks István's mother, when he returns from a visit to the hospital. ''I told you,' he says. 'You punched a door?' 'Yes.' 'But why?' 'I don't know,' he says.' Szalay resists the idea that his novels present a thesis. 'I'm just reporting what I see in the world, which tends to include men who lack a clear sense of what they should be doing and why.' If it's an identity crisis, it's not, he argues, a new phenomenon. 'When I was writing Flesh, I'd been reading Lord Jim, by Conrad, which was published in 1900 and which is about the gulf that exists between images of masculinity that exist in the culture and the experience of men trying to live up to those images, and failing.' Yet, surely, thanks to successive waves of feminism, those experiences and our ideas of what constitutes masculinity are more in flux than ever? 'Yes, but some things remain the same. I think the idea of violence in men, for example, is innate. We have a post-MeToo world, but I find it hard to imagine a post-violence world. In fact, in that respect, the world is going in the opposite direction. The strong warrior male is becoming much more a feature of modern politics.' All the same, he thinks masculinity is risky territory for contemporary male novelists. The rules have changed, too, for novels that embody a certain machismo and swagger. 'You couldn't write like Martin Amis or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth now. But it's inevitable that our views of writers, thinkers and artists will shift and morph over time. Although there's a kind of absolutist fervour now about [our attitude to certain dead, male novelists]. I'm wary of making sweeping statements, but moral certainty is never a very healthy state of mind.' As a young man, Szalay dreamt of becoming a writer, but instead he drifted into a job in telesales, an environment he describes as 'a shabby, shitty British version of Glengarry Glen Ross'. 'There was a very macho thing about being the hunter, this idea that you eat what you kill, and a kind of contempt for people on salaries who got given food whatever they did at work,' he says. 'I was in my mid-20s and, for a while, I was seduced by the whole ethos. But after a while, I got very depressed by it. Writing a novel was my unlikely escape.' That novel, London and the South-East, which won the 2008 Betty Trask Prize, drew with a satirical sting on his telesales experience, and it was followed by the Cold War novel The Innocent, and 2011's Spring, which both dealt with the bleaker undercurrents within a romantic relationship. In 2013, he was named as a Granta best British novelist under 40. But it was the Booker nomination that changed everything. 'It made it possible to live and work as a writer,' he says, although he admits he can only afford to do this in Hungary (and now Austria), rather than Britain. 'The Booker is a precious thing.' Characters in his novels share the rootless quality of his own life (few writers capture the anonymous globalised textures of contemporary Europe better than Szalay). He thinks his peripatetic experience, which has included periods living in France and, as a child, in Lebanon, has affected his writing for the better. 'You can see the downsides of staying fixed in the same place on modern American writers, for instance – the Brooklyn novelist has become such a cliché. There is an almost indistinguishable pack of them.' Pressed to name names, he demurs. 'It's a general sense that there are lots of writers in Brooklyn turning out tonally similar material.' It's tempting to assume he means writers such as Ben Lerner and Elif Batuman, whose hyper-literate novels share an ironic, at times overwhelmingly self-aware playfulness. What about the British novel, is it similarly stuck? 'It's harder to define, isn't it? The first English novelist to win the Booker for some years [referring to Samantha Harvey, who won last year for Orbital ], and she set her novel in space!' Perhaps British novelists have become wary of saying anything definitive about Britain, as though nationhood has become a toxic subject? 'But you'd think this would be exactly the scenario that would be fertile ground. Although I can't write a British state-of-the-nation novel sitting in Vienna. That would be absurd.' He's bullish about the future of the novel, although he hopes that Flesh is optioned for the screen. The cultural dominance of Netflix is, he argues, good for writers. 'It forces you to constantly think about why you are writing a novel and not for a TV streamer. You have to make a much more conscious effort not to just describe a TV show in your head.'
