Book: FLESH
Author: David Szalay
Published by: Jonathan Cape
Price: Rs 899
When Albert Camus opened The Stranger with Meursault’s flat announcement of his mother’s death — “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” — he was offering a radical proposition about fiction: that a character’s interior life need not be adorned or even fully accessible for a novel to reveal something essential about human existence. David Szalay’s Flesh, which won this year’s Booker Prize, advances a similar proposition, asking readers to simply follow a character before a story is imposed. Szalay builds an entire novel on a character who speaks little and admits almost nothing.
The protagonist is István, a Hungarian boy of fifteen when the novel opens. Szalay abjures the usual signals that can establish a setting or a period. The first chapters could take place in any post-industrial European town at any point in the last thirty years. Flats, supermarkets, estates and schools appear without fanfare. This absence of a definite setting is a way of forcing the reader’s focus onto the human figure rather than the social backdrop. István is not a talker. He answers most questions with short phrases, often a bare “Okay”. He reacts before he reflects, and his emotions have to be inferred — rather assumed — from his staccato phrases. The novel’s most striking effect arises from this tension between the reader’s desire for psychological depth and the protagonist’s inability to provide it. Minimalism here is not used to suggest stoicism or emotional suppression. Szalay’s aim is something more fundamental: sketching a life in which consciousness has not yet learned to articulate itself. Szalay’s prose is not ascetic just for the sake of effect. Its plainness serves the novel’s moral position: that much of human experience occurs beneath the threshold of lucid thought. István is not stupid, nor incapable of feeling. He simply lacks language and the author refuses to supply it on his behalf.
Readers familiar with J.M. Coetzee will recognise this aura of emotional austerity. Like Coetzee’s David Lurie, István seems sharply aware of certain situations but is strikingly blind to others. But where Lurie is full of self-justification, István has almost no interpretive framework at all. This is what gives Flesh its unusual strength. It is not a novel about a man reflecting on masculinity, morality or class. It is a novel about a man who moves through these realms without the conceptual vocabulary to describe them. The result is a portrait of modern masculinity that is neither elegiac nor accusatory. It is simply observed. Szalay’s technique also produces an unusual form of intimacy. Readers do not come to ‘know’ István in the usual literary sense — but by the end, they begin to recognise the small movements that reveal István’s confusion, the habits that shield him, the impulses that betray him. István thus remains a stranger to the reader in one sense and, yet, is deeply familiar in another.
One of the novel’s key achievements is its refusal to sentimentalise vulnerability. István is not written as a victim or a brute, a romantic hero or a cautionary tale. Szalay avoids the temptation to frame his protagonist within a tidy narrative of damage or recovery. Instead, the text suggests something far more disquieting: that a human life can unfold in a state of only partial self-knowledge, shaped as much by chance and circumstance as by choice. Szalay’s handling of time also deserves attention. Years pass with little narrative ceremony. Chapters open after long intervals — István kills a man and goes to a correctional home and readers meet him after he is released, he is sent off to war in Iraq and comes back from it — and the gaps are not filled in. There are no battlefield descriptions, no confessions to chaplains, no set speeches about trauma. Readers see István before and after each transformation. This produces a faint feeling of weightlessness, as though István’s life has advanced by accident. The technique is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s cold indifference to continuity: Kafka’s characters often find themselves in situations that have changed faster than their comprehension.
The title, Flesh, makes clear that Szalay places the body before interpretation. His novel suggests that people inhabit their physical impulses long before they shape these into stories about themselves. He never states this outright; he lets the behaviour on the page make the case. The effect is unsettling because it feels so true to life.
