Flesh
Authors: David Szalay
Published by: Penguin Vintage
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Published by: Penguin Vintage
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
My Rating: ★★★
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
My thoughts:
As I’ve been reading Flesh out and about recently, several people have asked me about it and I’ve found it a difficult one to describe. At its heart, Flesh is simply one man’s life story, but throughout the book author David Szalay finds something profound in the ordinary ups and downs of being human. I’d heard such mixed things about Flesh before picking it up, but the 2025 Booker prize win inevitably made me curious. And having now finished the novel, I can certainly see why it made a strong impression. I just can't quite say I was as enamoured with it as I’d hoped to be.
I think the writing is undoubtedly the biggest strength of the book, and there is something almost hypnotic about Szalay’s style. The prose is sparse and incisive, the dialogue often stripped back to its barest bones, and yet I found myself gripped and reading on with surprising urgency. It is a very readable book considering how little it seems to give you. So much is left unsaid, and Szalay trusts the reader to sit with the silences and fill in the gaps themselves.
There is a deliberate emotional distance to the novel that I admired more than I necessarily enjoyed. István remains elusive throughout, almost as though we are watching a life from behind glass: close enough to observe, but never quite close enough to touch.
The characters often feel empty, its conversations feel empty, and by the time I reached the final page, I felt a little empty myself too. But I can't deny that I found it gripping. For a novel so deliberately restrained, it has a real sense of momentum, and I was rarely bored. There is something compelling about simply being carried through one man's life and watching the consequences of his choices accumulate around him.
Perhaps that is the point, though. Flesh doesn't necessarily leave you full of emotion or answers. It left me with a strange sense of absence. And maybe that emptiness is exactly what Szalay wants his readers to feel.
I can understand why the Booker judges were drawn to its singularity and restraint, but while I found Flesh clever, affecting and undeniably memorable, I'm not sure it quite reached the heights I’d expect from a Booker Prize winner.
Overall reaction:
As I’ve been reading Flesh out and about recently, several people have asked me about it and I’ve found it a difficult one to describe. At its heart, Flesh is simply one man’s life story, but throughout the book author David Szalay finds something profound in the ordinary ups and downs of being human. I’d heard such mixed things about Flesh before picking it up, but the 2025 Booker prize win inevitably made me curious. And having now finished the novel, I can certainly see why it made a strong impression. I just can't quite say I was as enamoured with it as I’d hoped to be.
I think the writing is undoubtedly the biggest strength of the book, and there is something almost hypnotic about Szalay’s style. The prose is sparse and incisive, the dialogue often stripped back to its barest bones, and yet I found myself gripped and reading on with surprising urgency. It is a very readable book considering how little it seems to give you. So much is left unsaid, and Szalay trusts the reader to sit with the silences and fill in the gaps themselves.
There is a deliberate emotional distance to the novel that I admired more than I necessarily enjoyed. István remains elusive throughout, almost as though we are watching a life from behind glass: close enough to observe, but never quite close enough to touch.
The characters often feel empty, its conversations feel empty, and by the time I reached the final page, I felt a little empty myself too. But I can't deny that I found it gripping. For a novel so deliberately restrained, it has a real sense of momentum, and I was rarely bored. There is something compelling about simply being carried through one man's life and watching the consequences of his choices accumulate around him.
Perhaps that is the point, though. Flesh doesn't necessarily leave you full of emotion or answers. It left me with a strange sense of absence. And maybe that emptiness is exactly what Szalay wants his readers to feel.
I can understand why the Booker judges were drawn to its singularity and restraint, but while I found Flesh clever, affecting and undeniably memorable, I'm not sure it quite reached the heights I’d expect from a Booker Prize winner.
Overall reaction:
