Flesh
Flesh
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David Szalay on Flesh
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A scrapped novel and a cousin’s moveAfter spending years on a novel that reached nearly 100,000 words, Szalay concluded its central concept was wrong and abandoned it. He was under contract, and he knew one abandoned book was survivable. Two would not be.
I think while it might be okay to abandon one novel, to abandon two would be quite difficult for me to deal with psychologically. [paraphrased from audio]
The first chapter of Flesh came from one of the few pieces of that scrapped book he judged worth keeping.
His own years of living between London and Budapest gave the novel its emotional ground, but he was careful to separate that atmosphere from autobiography. The displacement he felt was real; the story of István, Flesh’s protagonist, was not his own.
Literally nothing in Flesh is directly autobiographical, but it started with my underlying experience of being poised between two places and feeling not 100% at home in either of them.
His cousin had made the exact reverse journey Szalay had, moving from Budapest to England after Hungary joined the EU in 2004. That migration, repeated by many thousands of Hungarians at the same moment, turned a private observation into a subject with social weight.
So it wasn’t just about me personally. There was a whole social phenomenon going on that I wanted to write about.
How he wrote it
Self-contained units, a stubborn word, and a violent scene that kept coming backThe chapter structure of Flesh, in which years of István’s life vanish between episodes, was not a late editorial decision but the book’s original architecture. Szalay wrote each chapter as a closed unit from the start, and the silence between them was load-bearing.
I enjoy books made of free-standing units of writing that are somehow in dialogue with one another, where what happens in the gaps is as important as the chapters themselves. The way that the reader has to do their own imaginative work means they might come away with a sense of having read a book that covers a large amount of human experience, without having to plough through a 1,000-page 19th-century novel.
An early act of violence kept being removed during revision because it felt melodramatic, belonging to a different kind of book. Each time he read the version without it, he changed his mind.
‘this is too much. This takes it into territory which belongs in another kind of novel, maybe. But then I’d read the version without it and think: I’m just being a coward... When I finally put that back in definitively, it set the path in terms of: things like that can happen in this book.’
István speaks rarely, explains himself almost never, and withholds what a more literary protagonist might lay bare. That reticence was a decision Szalay made at the outset, not a quality he discovered in the character later, and it shaped how the whole novel handles feeling.
I made a conscious decision to write about an inarticulate character... I think that Flesh is partly about the frustrating indeterminacy and intermittency of feelings, and the very slippery and complicated relationship between feelings and the words we use to express them. Unexpressed feelings, or clumsily or partly expressed feelings, or feelings buried somewhere in banal conversations, are often unforgettable.
Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, a novel Szalay returned to while writing Flesh, offered a structural precedent for rendering a life through glimpses rather than through sustained narration. He described what made it a useful model in the Service95 books feature.
it’s the story of a single individual, over many years, but told in the form of what amount to little more than momentary glimpses of him, separated by long stretches of time, which somehow come together to create a character at once intimately known and stubbornly mysterious.
Late in editing, a single word became a problem. Once the Booker shortlist arrived and the label ‘masculinity debate’ began to settle around the book, Szalay went back through the manuscript and removed it wherever it appeared.
The word masculinity only appears once in the book. I know this because I went through the text at a late stage of editing, thinking, Okay, I don’t really want this book to be labeled as the book about masculinity. So I found and removed a few examples of the word because they did tend towards steering the reader into thinking about this book in terms of a debate about contemporary masculinity.
On what the book is wrestling with
Bodies first, then everything elseThe title was the last thing to settle, and the conversation around it clarified what the whole project was actually doing. Szalay described the moment when the word finally made everything cohere.
We couldn’t come up with anything that nailed the book quite like the word ‘flesh’ does... It speaks to something in the book... life as a physical experience, life as being a body.
The novel’s perspective on its protagonist is anatomical before it is psychological. Szalay wanted to reverse the usual hierarchy that puts consciousness at the center and treats the body as its container.
I suppose I wanted the book to be a description, unflinching but also basically sympathetic, of what it’s like to inhabit a male body – or indeed to actually be a male body... I wanted to look at humans more as bodies that think.
The chapter ‘Plaster,’ in which István is caught in events he did not initiate and cannot redirect, gave Szalay the occasion to name the structural logic running beneath the whole novel. He wrote about it in the New Yorker before the book won the Booker.
István does not affect history, history affects István... I’d regard that kind of relationship, of the individual human being to events outside their control, as something universal, and the vital question is how we deal with being on the receiving end of it — how we deal with it practically, emotionally, even spiritually, ultimately. It’s the question raised by classical tragedy.
What he wants us to sit with
Moral difficulty and the preciousness of being aliveSzalay did not want the novel’s moral situations to resolve cleanly. He sought out material that kept him from reaching a settled verdict, because that discomfort seemed closer to what actual life feels like.
I find interesting, as material for a novel, stories and characters and situations that make it very hard to know what my own moral position is... I felt that my job as the author of this novel was to present them in their murkiness. Because again, I think that’s a very important aspect of our lives, of existence, this persistent moral difficulty.
When he accepted the Booker Prize, Szalay made a public case for what he hoped the prize’s endorsement would protect: the willingness of novelists to take genuine formal and moral risks, rather than retreating to safer ground.
I felt ‘Flesh’ is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it... it’s very important that the novel making community, if I can put it like that, embraces that sense of risk rather than shuns it. [paraphrased from audio]
At the New York Public Library, in conversation with Dua Lipa, Szalay described what he most hoped a reader would feel after following István across decades of change and accumulation. The tone there was not tragic but grateful.
The kind of beauty and preciousness of life, of being alive. I really hope that comes through.
He had conceived the novel as akin to a Greek tragedy, its protagonist thoroughly put through the wringer to reach catharsis. What he wanted waiting on the other side of that was not grief but recognition.