Latest news with #Szalay
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.
New York Times
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Alienated, Irresistible Man in a Novel Stripped to the Bones
In his indispensable book of political reportage, 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72,' Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the only objective journalism he'd seen was on 'a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colo.' Thompson's comment came back to me while reading 'Flesh,' the new novel from the uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay. To read this cool, remote book — among its primary subjects is male alienation — is to feel you are eyeballing the action on a bank of surveillance cameras. There will be no conspiratorial glances at those cameras, no metafictional winks. 'Flesh' is the sound a writer makes when he has lined up and shot his darlings as if they were the Romanovs. In terms of his style, a better title would be 'Bones.' The novel works because Szalay's simplicity is, like Hemingway's, the fatty sort that resonates. This book is the rags-to-riches story of a diffident and lonely young man, Istvan, who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. A lot happens to Istvan: As a virginal teen he will commence a clandestine affair with a much older woman; he will be held accountable for her husband's death; he will serve time in juvenile detention and alongside Norwegian soldiers in Iraq. He will learn that he can handle himself in rough situations. He is invited into security work and becomes a chauffeur in London for a family of one-percenters. He insinuates his way into this family without quite meaning to; he's a proletarian penetrating the conquering classes. Before long he's wearing Tom Ford suits, flying on helicopters and private jets, dining at the River Café and schtupping the callow wife. Istvan advances toward the redoubts of privilege, yet he remains coarse, inarticulate and boorish. Dark impulses lurk in him; he seems like a bystander to his own experience; he has the detachment of a survivor. He comes off like one of those guys who hits the 'door close' button six times in every elevator he enters. Yet Szalay lets us feel his inchoate longing for meaning, for experience, for belonging. He is more easily wounded than he lets on. You sense in him the muffled sadness of Eastern Europe. Time moves with an uncanny fluidity in 'Flesh.' Szalay slides the action forward, sometimes years at a time, in a manner that is seamless but unremarked upon in the text. The novel's tone can be reminiscent, if bleakly so, of Frank O'Hara's 'I do this, I do that' poems. Here is Istvan upon getting home from work: Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy), who was born in 1974, is hard to pin down as a writer. His five previous novels share little in common except a certain melancholy and an interest in masculinity under duress. He is best known for 'All That Man Is,' which was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2016. The one that has most stuck with me is 'Turbulence' (2019), a series of linked stories that tweeze us into the lives of air travelers. Istvan is not described, physically, in 'Flesh,' yet this novel is driven by his irresistibility to women. So many cannot wait to confer their bodies upon him. He appears to be what Lorrie Moore once called a 'dunk': 'half dork, half hunk.' When he's a teenager, he gratefully accepts sexual favors from the older woman while staring down into her gray roots. (Mrs. Robinson alert: She is all of 42.) Later, he sleeps not only with Helen, the married woman he is hired to drive around, but the family's young nanny. The plot gains momentum in its second half when the family's son turns against Istvan, who along with Helen has been siphoning off his enormous inheritance. Here is Helen, reporting on her son's comment about Istvan: 'He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity. He said he was surprised that I ever found that attractive.' There is no one to root for, morally, in 'Flesh.' You wonder if perhaps the plot will come down, to borrow the title of an Anthony Powell novel, to a question of upbringing. But extremes meet here: Rich and poor seem equally empty and meretricious. We are living in a world that lacks moral champions, and Szalay's book makes you feel their absence like a physical ache. I admired this book from front to back without ever quite liking it, without ever quite giving in to it. Sometimes those are the ones you itch to read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.
Associated Press
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: Spare writing style propels tragic story in ‘Flesh'
Istvan, the protagonist in David Szalay's new novel 'Flesh,' is a character who reveals little in his conversations with others. His clipped responses to questions are akin to the frustrating conversations adults have with teenagers. That reticence throughout 'Flesh' demonstrates how much Istvan remains frozen in time as a shy Hungarian teenager forced to grow up. Szalay's novel follows Istvan's life in various moments, beginning when he's a 15-year-old who lives alone with his mother. Istvan is coerced into a sexual relationship with a married woman who lives across the hall. When that relationship ends in tragedy and violence, it upends Istvan's life and overshadows his interactions. Szalay's straightforward, spare prose helps propel the novel as the effects of that tragedy reverberate throughout his life. Istvan comes across in much of the novel as someone still stuck somewhat as a teenager, unable to completely interact with others on an adult level. It appears as though physical relationships are the only time he can truly connect with other adults. The changes to Istvan are subtle but significant as he grapples with the trauma that left him stuck, especially as he forms a relationship with a woman who forces him to see what true connection means. He also learns what it means to confront loss and loneliness. The power of 'Flesh' is Szalay's ability to let these moments speak for themselves, letting these simple interactions tell a tragic story. ___
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.'
