Flesh

Flesh by David Szalay 

Pub date: 2025

How I read it: Audiobook

Narrator: Daniel Weyman

Tags: Dark, subtle, narcotic

In a nutshell: Flesh tells the story of a man’s life, lived as it came to him. It’s shallow at first then grows roots. We meet teenage István as a youth, living with his mother in Hungary. Encounters with an older woman spark an act of violence that sets him on a path – one of many through the shifts and twists of his life as a man, a killer, a soldier, a lover, a husband, a father. He goes from poor to unbelievably rich and back to a working man, all with little conscious choice and a lot of detachment. Whatever happens, he just keeps rolling.

Writing: Szalay’s writing is sullen, lean, occasionally beautiful and profound. He tells István’s story chronologically in the third person, and the storytelling has a reporting aspect to it. Szalay is impressive and does as much with pauses as he does with words, like an artist working with white spaces along with colors.

He realizes that the things that are so important to him, the things that happened and that he saw there, things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again, they just aren’t important here. Those things have no reality here…So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you when they seem to have no reality here.

And another thing: István is a man of few words and his overuse use of “yeah, “ok” and “sure” were slightly hypnotic in the narrator’s low and slow delivery. If you read the physical book be sure to read slowly to get the full effect.

Bottom line: Flesh won the Booker Prize last year and I read it without knowing a thing about it. For the first third I was waiting for a plot to emerge, wondering if it was just about a guy trying to get laid (seriously!). But it hooked me and eventually I realized that his life is the plot.