2025 Booker Prize winner David Szalay’s Flesh asks what it really means to be a man

Vignettes of violence

He experiences sex as abuse when he is 15, used by a lonely older woman. He does not choose the relationship with her anymore than he can choose a teacher, a mother. He does not choose the putrefied love he feels for her, or the act of violence that sees him incarcerated. He does not choose the army later, or a security job in London or his affair, that makes him a billionaire. He does not choose the tragedy that places him back in his small town in Hungary. He does not even choose the moral act, the absence of which could have helped him keep his fortune.

Flesh says something about masculinity and violence, that is now rarely admitted even in fiction. In his rags-to-riches-to-rags tale, Szalay, seems to give the impression that he is only telling us a part of Istvan’s mind. A sort of X-ray of his thoughts that leaves out the wrinkles, the skin, the flesh and the colour. In this stark picture, you see that so many people are struggling to define to themselves violence, power, happiness, vulnerability, comfort. Istvan’s lack of thoughts on his life underline just how pointless most such rumination, theorising and moralising really is.

The aesthetic of distance

Istvan doesn’t shape his life — life happens to him. In Flesh, David Szalay strips away the inner monologue to reveal masculinity in its rawest form. (Source: amazon)

Szalay’s prose is sparse, easy to parse. But the weight of Istvan’s life – the power of his desire, the in the moment-ness of every stage of his life which is both a function of his past and seemingly divorced from it – is painful for the reader. You feel his disgust and desire for the abuser, without every knowing how or why. His refuge in the bottle is not over-wrought – Istvan is not Devdas. And you know that if you saw the broken man in a bar, you would not reach out, maintaining the same distance that the writer does as he shows you his body drinking, but no more.

Szalay leaves you with the feeling that this is a burden that must be borne, the soreness of muscles torn and rebuilt after exercise. The unease readers will feel throughout and after reading the book is, in this lobotomised age, a necessary one.

To see a life lived, not from the inside as most novels do, but to look at it as though on a safari, from the safety of the jeep, is something remarkable. It deserves to be on a shortlist of one.

Flesh
David Szalay
Penguin RandomHouse
349 pages
Rs 899