Flesh by David Szalay (2025)

Did you miss me last week? I was very sick and could not read. Now I’m back with some overdue opinions. Specifically about Flesh by David Szalay.

I don’t know, man.

This book won the 2025 Booker and the judges said “Flesh is a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it. The emotional detachment of the main character, István, is sustained by the tremendous movement of the plot. The pace of this novel speaks to one of the greater themes; the detachment of our bodies from our decisions.’

Sure.

but also, I spent the whole time reading this book drafting an essay in my head about how it seems to me that men don’t have thoughts. Based on this book and also my interactions with men in the wild, it’s entirely plausible that men simply don’t have an internal life. This novel is not interested in exploring any of the thoughts or feelings the main character has at all, and that seems to be a part of the point. But the “emotional detachment” that the booker judges loved just seemed to me like something that kept me out of the story completely. The character can be emotionally detached, but could the narrator give me a little tiny hint at what he might be repressing? Maybe the narrator was also a man who doesn’t have interiority or introspection.

Since I borrowed this from the library, I put little yellow post-its everywhere this became explicitly clear or frustrating to me.

If I cared more or had energy, I would write that essay. But, as it is, I didn’t feel much about this novel. It’s clear a lot of people like it and it did very well. I found it boring and unilluminating. I know just as little about the main character on the last page as i do the first. (Some people would argue with me about that - but I guess what i mean is that nothing I find interesting about humantity was explictly explored here. Instead of my hypothetical essay (which would have started with a personal anecdote about how sometimes I ask jonathan what he’s thinking about and he is genuinely surprised, he says “nothing.”) i’m going to show you the notes I wrote on the post-its.

To explain it to the men- As I read, my brain had a cognitive reaction- that’s called a thought. An emotional reaction is called a feeling. I continued to think about those thoughts and feelings until I could describe them in words. Then I wrote them down.