Mr. Szalay instills his characters with almost no inner life. The descriptions of each scene are ruthlessly pared back and the dialogue is almost comically minimalist ... These reductions can feel exaggerated—Mr. Szalay pushes his flat, desiccated writing style to some eye-rolling extremes—but the effect is hypnotic ... Taboo for so long, the female body has become a subject of celebratory interest in contemporary novels; meanwhile, explorations into the male sex drive have been tacitly proscribed. Mr. Szalay turns a cold gaze on those urges and makes no promises that we’ll be comfortable with what he sees.
A gentle yet deeply affecting novel about a taciturn man who overcomes abuse and loss early in life to stumble into transitory contentment — if not quite true happiness — as an adult ... Fascinating and unexpected ... If you’ve ever woken up to the realization that your life has become something you never planned for, anticipated, or desired, you’ll likely find Flesh all too human.
Unbookish straight men are a Szalay specialty. He writes with great formal rigor about the foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom ... István’s is a masculinity reduced by various kinds of violence—a huddled masculinity, diffident and uncertain even in its rages, its predations. The narrow compass of his interiority summons a narrow prose. Blunt one- or two-sentence paragraphs. A limited word hoard. (The novel is very easy to read.) ... Flesh has been praised for its originality ... But, I thought when I had finished it, it is like several things I’ve read before. To begin with, it’s a saga: ups, downs, rags, riches, rags again; finds love, child dies, loses love. The deep structure of the book isn’t a million miles removed from that of something like Gone with the Wind. And in many ways Flesh quite closely resembles Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (which, like Flesh, won the Booker): the repressed man, submitting to a social order he cannot truly understand, all the weight of loss and love carried in and by the unspoken … There is a sense in which Flesh is comfortingly familiar, an old-school weepie that is gratifyingly easy to read ... The achievement of Flesh is that it will withstand a lot of this kind of critical reflection. This is partly because a great deal of rigorous thinking about how to represent men’s minds and men’s bodies has been left implicit in the book, and partly because of the care with which Szalay has brought his angry, innocent, constricted hero to life. Szalay is an accumulative writer. This is the realist’s secret tactic, the realist’s secret wager: Add enough small instances of precision and the whole will, in the end, stand clear, will live. The short, bland sentences remorselessly add up, like life. István lives. Even if, in the end, he isn’t really okay.
Uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay ... Cool, remote ... The novel works because Szalay’s simplicity is, like Hemingway’s, the fatty sort that resonates ... Time moves with an uncanny fluidity ... I admired this book from front to back without ever quite liking it, without ever quite giving in to it. Sometimes those are the ones you itch to read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.
A bare-bones plot description does not do justice to Szalay’s literary achievement in the novel, which, as ever, is predicated upon his stylistic legerdemain ... If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the author’s earlier work, it comes pretty damn close.
Anything that pertains to human experience is of interest to Szalay. He is a shape-shifter, persuasively inhabiting the skins of men and women anywhere on the globe ... Remarkable ... The result of Szalay’s abstemiousness is a spare portrait of a man bemused at his own life and hobbled largely beyond help by its traumas.
Szalay’s straightforward, spare prose helps propel the novel as the effects of that tragedy reverberate throughout his life ... The power of Flesh is Szalay’s ability to let these moments speak for themselves, letting these simple interactions tell a tragic story.
Szalay consciously leaves much of the melodrama and violence in István’s life off the page, and while not a horror story at all, Szalay employs this cutaway technique to offer the reader a series of narrative gaps, the kind of blank spaces where, as in a horror film, a mind wanders to the bleakest of possibilities to fill ... Flesh’s one true flaw arises in scenes where the author excludes his protagonist. Without István, these pages turn superfluous, reinforcing information already strongly implied, or producing thin subplots ... A shrewd novel that leverages the unsaid to speak volumes.
Page-turner ... The prose is unnervingly lucid, with a preponderance of punchy, one-sentence lines designed to draw our eyes down the page ... Szalay’s gender fatalism might seem like a cop-out, a way of reducing men’s plight to a problem of unprocessed trauma and uncontrollable impulses. But even as the book fails as sociology, it succeeds as a character study, giving us a hero too vivid to write off, and bringing us into close contact with a soul that would rather be out of our reach.
Ensnared me ... It’s tense, unnerving and charged with a sense of the fragility of our lives. It’s also a book with lots of sex, sexily told ... The novel is written with the terse narrative style of a thriller, the white space communicating as much as the words ... Revelatory.
This is a novel of the body in motion ... Speeding through Szalay’s bite-sized paragraphs is, like doomscrolling, equal parts immersive and addictive ... Trust me: you will feel it in your bones.
Such novels are now rare, as male writers seem increasingly frightened to describe and reckon with the potentially destructive aspects of their character. In this context Flesh feels especially refreshing, illuminating and true. More than that, it is a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates.
Lean and laconic prose ... He employs the strategies of the short stories to produce a very different kind of novel that at first seems picaresque in structure ... We know him and don’t know him; he has remained essentially the same, through triumph and humiliation, yet matured to the point that later on.
Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat ... All bone. Szalay has always been a master of the flinty, spare sentence but in this novel he has pared things back even more brutally ... There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues.
Szalay has completely overhauled his prose style. Gone are the extraneous adverbs, the overwrought imagery, the cumbersome syntax. Instead, a radically pared-back aesthetic lends powerful immediacy to this picaresque tale of a taciturn Hungarian man named István ... In the early chapters, Szalay’s new, sparer prose style is enlivened by regular restarts and a steady fusillade of narrative shocks. When the frequency and power of these shocks diminishes, the pared-back prose struggles to sustain narrative tension ... Szalay himself seems aware that the novel is flagging: in the final fifty pages, he lobs another volley of narrative shocks at the reader. This time he goes too far and tilts into melodrama. At the end, I felt surprisingly little for István.
Compulsively readable. In some ways, it reads like a thriller because of its gripping plotline, but also because there’s an edge of violence to István that seems like it could detonate at any moment ... I’m glad I’ve stuck with Szalay over these last 15 years. Like many of the best writers, he flies under the radar, reappearing once in a while with a new book, then disappearing again, leaving his readers longing for more. Flesh is, I think, his best novel yet, quietly traumatising, with memorable characters and a rather brilliant last line whose peaceful resignation lies in marked contrast to the dramatic experiences that precede it.
Everyone in Flesh is inarticulate, emotionally detached and passive in the flow of the story, yet, I have not stopped thinking about this audacious novel since I read it ... An outstanding achievement.
Has a lot of flesh, although eroticism, none of it glamorous, is only one part of this multifaceted work ... Impressive ... The obvious allusion to carnal pleasure also has its Shakespearean side, with some characters keen on revenge and exacting their pound of flesh. That's only one of the many subtleties and layers of complexity readers will find in this rewarding work from one of the most original authors in English letters.
A heartbreaking and revelatory portrait of a taciturn Hungarian man who serially attempts to build a new life after his traumatic adolescence ... This tragedy will leave readers in awe.
