Flesh

Winner of the Booker Prize, and the Soho House Booksmiths book club pick for March.

Flesh follows a Hungarian man, István, as events propel him through life. It opens straight into a quite intense start, in the first pages, a young István is being offered by his friend to have sex with his girlfriend. This then leads onto an even more questionable storyline between István and his older next door neighbour.

Each chapter has a period of time in between, that isn’t explicitly mentioned, but soon becomes clear that the story has jumped forward, often years at a time. A lot of the action actually happens off the pages. As a reader it requires you to fill in the gaps, meaning everyone could have a different interpretation of what could have happened off page.

The conversation is so sparse, in what is actually said; there are pages of István just saying “yeah okay”. It seems as if István doesn’t have agency, but actually I think he does, he’s just not explicitly speaking the words on the page.

We had such an interesting discussion - what makes life worth living - is István in control of his life, or do things just happen to him - and questions on power and consent. There was also a lot of discussion around masculinity, but Szalay has spoken in interviews about how he doesn’t want it to be taken as a book solely around this topic. At a recent author talk, he described István as “not freakishly passive, quite normal”.

A really interesting novel that I personally liked but am not sure that everyone would!