Flesh - David Szalay [Review]

Chapter one, we’re in Hungary. Chapter three, we’re in the aftermath of war. Chapter four, we’re somehow in…Ilford? Romford? Wanstead?

Flesh follows István, a boy from a grey housing estate in Hungary who grows into a man by accident more than design. His life unfolds as a sequence of dislocated episodes: a sexual relationship with his mother’s friend while still a teenager, a stint in the army, work as a nightclub bouncer and later a security guard in London, and a marriage that feels more like an arrangement than a partnership. The details change, but the mood doesn’t.

This book is quite the ride, though not necessarily an enjoyable one. The chapters feel detached, which is clearly deliberate. Szalay writes in fragments, it reads a bit like a short story collection in the way that the author abruptly throws you into an unfamiliar setting, until you register we have just skipped 5 years ahead. You start to care about something, and suddenly we’ve skipped five years ahead.

It’s both over-specific and strangely vacant. He’ll name very specific roads, the Royal Tandoori or Barkers on Kensington High Street, but the club István works at and various characters throughout are nameless. Damian Green bizarrely gets a name drop, but the people who actually matter to the story often remain blurred. Instances of “What does that actually involve?” she asks. He explains what he does’ occur frequently, and yet at other times several pages are dedicated to, for example, István talking to his son Jacob about being bullied in school, which has no narrative function once the conversation ends. Why the conversation with a minister is dismissed with “the minister listens”, and the discussion with Jacob isn’t similarly dismissed with “Jasob talks about it” is unclear to me. The precision and the vagueness sit awkwardly together. The world feels real, but the people in it don’t.

The dialogue doesn’t help either. Characters echo what’s just been said, or repeat questions word for word. At first I thought this was deliberate, a stylistic reflection of trauma or repression, but he’s like this from the very start. The effect is hypnotic but also dull. If you think I’m exaggerating, here is just one example:

“You on vacation?” he asks.

“No, we live here,” the taller girl says.

“You live here?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you live here?”

“We study here.”

“You study here?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you study?”

“Medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Yeah.”

“You must be very intelligent,” István says.

“Yeah, very,” the taller girl says, and laughs.

And then there’s the sex. So much sex. It’s mechanical, constant, almost farcical after a while. István seems to sleep with everyone, and everyone seems to want him. Maybe that’s the point; the body as habit, desire as reflex. But it’s hard not to feel pulled out of it. For a man who barely speaks and has the emotional warmth of concrete, he’s oddly irresistible.

Still, beneath the greyness there’s a truth about a certain kind of modern despair. It’s about what happens when life keeps moving but you stay still.

Because Szalay isn’t just writing about apathy, he’s writing about what happens when the world strips you of the ability to feel deeply. István’s numbness isn’t a failure of character, it’s a symptom of survival. His story is about how people become strangers to their own bodies, bystanders to their own lives. Flesh becomes something you live inside rather than something you are. Every mechanical sexual encounter, every polite half-thought, adds to that same quiet erosion.

The title starts to feel less about lust and more about embodiment. What it means to live in a body that wants things it can’t name, in a world that rewards endurance more than emotion. Szalay is mapping how masculinity, class and exhaustion knot together until all that’s left is the will to keep going. István’s life is one long shrug, but there’s tragedy underneath it. He never learns what it feels like to truly want something while appearing to have everything.

Szalay’s restraint can be maddening, but it’s also the point. He doesn’t dramatise the emptiness, he lets it build quietly until it’s just there. The trouble is, the precision of the idea doesn’t always translate into feeling. For a novel about the raw fact of being alive, it rarely feels alive. You can admire the discipline of it, the austerity, the refusal to indulge, but after a while the detachment stops revealing anything new. It’s all surface tension, with no current underneath. The bleakness is persuasive, but not transformative. You end up respecting the book more than you’re moved by it.

You finish Flesh not dazzled or devastated, but faintly anaesthetised. It’s like catching your own reflection in a dark window; familiar, unflattering, and hard to look at for long. Szalay is circling something profound about embodiment and meaning, but his approach keeps that insight just out of reach. It’s clever, and rigorous, just not quite alive enough to make you feel the weight of what it’s saying.