‘Flesh’ by David Szalay

David Szalay’s Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. The title Flesh conjures up nihilism or hedonism, neither of which particularly appeals to me. So, it’s taken a while for me to overcome that initial barrier and get around to reading the novel. Flesh is not nihilist or hedonistic. And much of the commentary about it gets the novel wrong. Reviews tend to focus on the ‘minimalistic’ prose, the overly ‘passive’ protagonist, and frequent use of one word dialogue responses like ‘okay’.

After reading the novel, I can say that the text has plenty of elaborate prose, so it’s not as minimalist as people might imagine. The ‘passive’ protagonist is actually quite a realistic portrait of an ordinary man. He is not superhuman – he’s a ‘regular guy’ who is unlucky in some ways, has anger management issues, is not in touch with himself, and is traumatised by life. The one word dialogue does become repetitive, but it’s there to make a point about human disconnection and lack of emotional expression.

So, what is Flesh? It’s an expansive novel about a man’s life, going from his adolescence right up to middle age. The long time span, the prose style and the condensed vignettes remind me of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. The sexual and self-discovery dimension has echoes of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women, which is also about the life of Hungarian man. One final comparison is Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.