Flesh by David Szalay — Notes

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.

A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.

Why I Picked It Up

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Flesh is the 2025 winner of the Booker Prize, and I remember it causing some hubbub when named—because it went alongside a lot of straight, white, male writers claiming they were discriminated against in publishing. (I want to say it was Caro Claire Burke—author of the recently buzzy Yesteryear—who had a good video debunking this by analyzing the overwhelmingly male Booker Prize stats, but I can't find it now so could be incorrect in my sourcing.) I have strong thoughts on the particular vibe of maligned male writers in the literary space, but this is not the review for that.

The reason why Flesh was significant for this is because it's supposed to be a book on the underrepresented topics of masculinity and repression. Needless to say, we can unpack plenty. All I knew going in was that it was supposedly very "sparse" (which always tends to be a danger word for me—see Joan Didion—in indicating that what's deemed literary is socially defined. Which doesn't mean that it isn't great! Just that the status of the book is doing a lot of work for the reader, perhaps inseparably.)

So: I read Flesh for the clout, actually. I take a lot of pride in being a wide-ranging reader and being fluent across genres.

I was also under the impression that Flesh was very sexual, an association bolstered by the title. That's not really my reading or film vibe (see: the latest season of Euphoria feeling like...a lot) because it can veer into shock factor pretty easily, and I don't necessarily love reading about men romanticizing their depersonalization of women. (Cough, cough: Norwegian Wood.)

From online conversation, I thought that Flesh was basically a book about incels, meaning I had no real reason to pick it up if not for the prize association. It was actually much lighter on that front than I was expecting by the way people talked about it; I assumed Beat Generation or American Psycho vibes. (To this day, American Psycho is the book that has most physically affected me. I threw up after reading it.) It's about one specifically narrow version of masculinity, sure, but I didn't even register it mostly as about masculinity, or the "male loneliness crisis."

The main catalyst for me was that I've been in a bit of a reading slump where nothing felt great to finish, so was eager for a library read to do the job. At YALLWEST last weekend (which I need to debrief!), I was talking so nervously to one of my literary idols, David Levithan, at the kickoff party, and he'd mentioned he was working his way through the Booker Prize finalists. So I also did it because of the David Levithan association.

Notes & Bits to Cover in My Review

• Love the cover, especially that shade of green
• Interested in the moments in which the main character talks about things feeling real or unreal, and when that's a good vs. bad thing
• The book isn't very interior or reflective, maybe its most controversial quality, because you're giving a lot of credit to the author's intentionality in lack of depth at any given time.
• Author has an obsession with the quality of light (as do I), which also goes along with this sense of timelessness and the real/unreal as his one way of indicating. to himself that things are different. That particular obsession reminds me of Anne Carson's discussion of the same, which led me to making the connection that Flesh and Carson's Autobiography of Red feel emotionally similar.
• I also watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower last weekend for the first time in years, and certain stripes of Flesh could feel similar.
• Instead of "love," István treats people as interchangeable (my worst nightmare) and at first is only curious; he only grows attached to people through what's essentially the longing for familiarity, in that it's not actually qualities of another person that he enjoys so much as the sense of having gotten "used to" them with the passing of time. (Again, that emphasis on being into and out of time.) He feels betrayed when he's shifted into the unfamiliar i.e. the lack of someone—but is that really love? It doesn't feel malicious, but is a lesser-seen mode of attachment. You can say that's not "real" love, but everyone's version of love is different.
• Readers should note that the book starts out with childhood sexual assault—István being groomed by his forty-year-old neighbor. Like his other experiences, he starts out curious, then is somewhat disgusted/unattracted, then becomes attached because of time passing—but not because of the essentialism of the other person. That method is directly formed by the way his progression of love and sexuality developed out of order.
• "Bored, lonely boy joins army" is so overdone, so I both see why it's a Booker Prize winner but also why the repetition of this archetype is somewhat annoying. He won't even tell the reader why the military traumatized him, which again you can read generously (stylistic depiction of repression) or cynically (underdeveloped.)
• In many ways, feels like Norwegian Wood but maybe the specifically sunny imagery (smoke/sun/heat/sweat vs. city/underwater) keeps it from being quite as horribly depressing.
• Much to discuss re: the therapist encouraging him to actually write down his emotional granularity, because there are fascinating studies about emotional granularity that I obsess over.
• Many particular lines or ideas I loved, which took me by surprise.
• I loved the structure, and the time jumps genuinely made sense. Maybe the most successful "life-sprawling" read I've finished in that sense—a golden standard for when to transition chapters, what information to withhold, how to set the scenes minimally.
• Admittedly, I found the ending cheap and obvious, and my dislike of the final 10% or so of the book majorly swung me towards being frustrated by the patterns that Flesh perpetuated. Like: of course that won the Booker, but I don't find those conclusions groundbreaking or clever. I have a major frustration with authors whose endings only feel like they were backed into a corner.

For clarity, I actually ripped through this book, which was exactly what I needed and means, to me, that I ultimately loved it. I started it while taking a rare bath, and intended to spend maybe 45 minutes reading; I ended up spending about three hours in the tub by accident because I couldn't put it down until I'd finished. Propulsive is another word often overused in literary circles (a danger word), but it truly was.

While the ending bugged me and made me question further the line of what the book genuinely intended vs. what genius we're projecting onto it (a constant circle for books like this), I honestly loved the experience of reading it—which is really what I want. It made me think and analyze, and there are a lot of subjective decisions that could go either way. I'd love to book club it and any voice note version would likely go on for two hours, which is why I'm still mulling over how to construct my thoughts and how to describe how it landed for me.

More to come!