‘Flesh’ by David Szalay: What the body remembers as accomplice, adversary, witness

In her acceptance speech after winning the Nobel Prize in 2024, writer Han Kang deliberated on the questions that are asked of literature: “What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may?” In her best-known novel ‘The Vegetarian’, Kang plumbs the depths of the bodily experience, treating the body as a site of violence and one of resistance and transcendence. David Szalay, too, follows a similar trajectory in his Booker Prize-winning novel ‘Flesh’: “to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world”.

The living body in Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ is an adolescent, Istvan. The novel begins with him trying to fit in a new environment. Having moved into a drab housing estate with his mother in a Hungarian town, the 15-year-old is soon initiated into a sexual relationship by a much older married neighbour. Though initially repulsed by the woman, he begins to find incremental pleasure after every encounter. To the point that he cannot let go of the woman when she decides to end their affair.

A scuffle with her husband at their house ends with the man falling off the stairs to his death. Accused of murder, Istvan is sent to a detention centre. The first chapter ends on this note, with minimal description but a heightened sense of disorientation. We are palpable to Istvan’s bafflement about a tragedy that will impact him forever. What is unsaid builds the atmospherics in much of the novel.

Everything is pared down in this narrative, even memory. There are no backstories here, no verbal calisthenics, and not much interiority. One wonders what to make of this laconic young loner as he reaches middle age across the 349 pages of the novel. Every chapter is a progression in Istvan’s life journey. But each can be remarkably read as a standalone story too.

After serving time at the detention centre, Istvan joins the army when he can find no other job. When he returns home from the war in Iraq, we learn about his trauma not through any inner monologue but from a shocking act of violence — Istvan bloodies his hand after punching it into a door.

It is as if the body is singularly in charge — acting, emoting and responding to Istvan’s internal turmoil.

One is never really privy to what goes on in his mind. And perhaps Istvan too is unable to register it as his conversation oscillates between “okays”, “maybes”, “don’t knows” and “yeahs”. The word ‘okay’ apparently appears 340 times across the novel. Szalay has explained how such “repetitions and circularities and non-meaningful grunts” constitute a lot of real dialogue between people.

In one of the novel’s few reflective moments, Istvan observes, almost with surprise, that “you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing”. It’s a line that resonates deeply, serving as the novel’s thesis: the body as accomplice, adversary and witness.

As Istvan moves to London, this physicality defines him even more as he plays out the multiple assigned roles of the immigrant — as a bouncer and chauffeur. Though his physical features are not described at length, one gathers that he is attractive. Soon, his employer’s wife takes him as her lover and eventually marries him. The world he has viewed from the outside now becomes his. But does he still remain on the margins in the high-class world that is thrust upon him? Even while experiencing affluence, pleasure and grief, we see a man who cannot be fully invested in it. Perhaps this social and emotional detachment is what propels Istvan in life — at home, in the battlefield or in an alien country.

When asked about his immigrant experience, Szalay spoke of the ever-present duality, of never being quite at home in Hungary or the UK. It’s a feeling that afflicts Istvan as well.

In the end, the rather lame question to ask would be if ‘Flesh’ is the kind of novel that stays with you. Well, there is no easy answer. However, the inscrutable Istvan does stay with you, in an unsettling, troubling way.

— The reviewer is a freelance contributor