Szalay’s ‘Flesh’

I read David Szalay’s ‘Turbulence’ a few years back and loved it. It was a series of interconnected stories of characters that encounter each other on random flights (or something like that). This year, when Szalay again made it to the Booker shortlist, I decided to pick him up.

‘Flesh’ has its flaws but Szalay kept me gripped and invested in the story til the end. Istvan, the Hungarian protagonist, makes it big from a life of poverty. But in the end, he ends up where he began and accepts all of it stoically. Through spare prose, Szalay traces Istvan’s journey from the Iraq War to the glittering world of London jet-setters, his brief involvement in the cocaine trade, his dealings with gig workers, parenting during the lockdown, and finally, his quiet descent into the routine life of a supermarket security guard. He sails through all of this by bottling up his feelings and also grappling with the dilemmas posed by desire and sex. In fact, it is this theme, that Szalay excavates with mastery. According to the Guardian,  ‘István has something of the existential wayfarer about him – Camus’ Meursault meets Forrest Gump’

He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There’s often this feeling of – Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It’s not even that I like them more. It’s just that I don’t like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing, and that arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he’s somehow meant to be with.

Szalay is most known for this 2016 ‘All That Man Is‘ – 9 short stories of 9 men, each in their own stages of life.