David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ Turns a Body Into a Life’s Unspoken Record

István’s body is almost constantly present in David Szalay’s “Flesh”, even when his inner life remains difficult to reach. Desire, sex, violence, military service and aging receive far more detailed attention than the emotions connected to them.

The body seems to reveal what István cannot or does not want to put into words. Szalay has said that the novel began with the experience of physical existence itself: what it means to be present in the world as a living body. “Flesh” therefore is not only a novel about things left unsaid. It also explores the distance between bodily experience and the attempt to interpret it.

István’s body responds, desires, suffers, adapts and grows old, while István himself rarely explains what these experiences mean. The physical world is concrete, but the inner meaning attached to it often remains obscure.

That restraint contrasts with Szalay’s precise attention to István’s surroundings, objects and social environment. The novel’s first section unfolds in the Hungarian setting of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in a southern city that the text does not name but that Szalay later identified as Pécs. The cramped panel-flat interiors, family relationships and objects of everyday life evoke the period through a handful of exact details. The effect is not documentary so much as remembered.

The article also questions whether “Flesh” can be read as a Bildungsroman. It follows a young man from adulthood into old age, but István’s changing circumstances do not become a clear story of personal development. Experiences accumulate on him rather than forming a coherent process of self-understanding. His life contains change, loss, relationships and aging, yet these do not resolve into one identifiable lesson.