Flesh
by David Szalay

Reviewed by Wendy Tucker

This novel of restrained, realist fiction is the winner of the prestigious and lucrative Booker Prize for 2025. Not unusually, it caused controversy with its extremely pared-back prose that follows the life of one man from adolescence to late middle age.

David Szalay was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, grew up in London, lived in Hungary and is now based in Vienna. He has had six well-reviewed novels published and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2016, yet he remained relatively unknown until this surprising win.

Our protagonist is a taciturn Hungarian man named Istvan. At 15, an unpopular and sexually confused Istvan is seduced by his neighbour, whom he thinks of as very old. She’s 42. This opening chapter is brilliantly handled. Istvan imagines that he is in love with her. He is anguished when she ends the affair and confronts her in her flat. An altercation with her husband follows and in the scuffle the husband falls down the stairs, hits his head and dies. When the police suggest that Istvan deliberately pushed him, Istvan, knowing this is not true but inarticulate and feeling guilty, confesses and is sent to juvenile prison.

This is the Istvan we begin to know, if we ever really know him. Istvan becomes a man whose mind has shut down and becomes only body, hence the title. Istvan is only flesh. Life and its vagaries only happen to Istvan, he doesn’t seem to act and is instead acted upon. He says very little. All the words have been said before and changed nothing. Istvan says: Okay, I’m okay, Yeah. One reader counted the okays and reached 400, then stopped! Yet the novel contains a lot of dialogue as the other characters fill in for Istvan.

We travel with Istvan: with the army in Afghanistan; selling drugs in Croatia; nightclub bouncer in London; a chauffeur for a very rich woman; an affair with and marriage to this very rich woman; becoming very rich; having a son; becoming a property developer in corrupt London; and losing it all.

The full circle back to menial jobs in Hungary.

So, what’s it all about? The lifelong effects of child abuse, the corrupt world of the super-rich, indifference as a shield against fate and the indifference of the world … I was left wondering, and I like that. I loved this novel but I’m still not sure why.