Booker Prize Shortlist<\/a>. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year\u2019s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the announcement Nov. 10, tune in for our final predictions piece, where we will share who we think will win (and who we think should)<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\u2014 Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts Editor, and Alex Hetzler, Books Beat Editor<\/em><\/p>\nReaders of David Szalay\u2019s \u201cFlesh,\u201d shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, should not be fooled by its simple prose \u2014 it is a complex, frustrating and gripping story of exploitation, masculinity, class mobility and how both natural urges and random chance can change our lives in ways we do not expect. Reading \u201cFlesh\u201d feels like watching protagonist Istv\u00e1n\u2019s life through a security camera. Like we shouldn\u2019t be there to see it, but we can\u2019t stop watching either.<\/p>\n
The plain, ambiguous style of the novel amplifies Istv\u00e1n\u2019s personal characteristics. His passivity, which began when he was groomed as a child by his older female neighbor, is shown through his short responses and the lack of narration about his emotions. His passive nature also makes small words and phrases feel charged with anxiety and uncertainty. Before reading \u201cFlesh,\u201d I never realized how horrifying the phrase \u201cyeah okay\u201d \u2014 Istv\u00e1n\u2019s characteristic response \u2014 could be. As he is exploited by others and transformed by their needs and expectations, the lack of actual information about him and his emotions makes readers complicit in the narrative; we impose our own perspectives and biases onto him, just like those in his life do.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cFlesh\u201d is organized into vignettes from Istv\u00e1n\u2019s life. The novel encompasses his time as a teenager, the aftermath of his time in prison, his military service and his unlikely rise (and fall) from wealth, jumping across long periods of time between each. Beyond Istv\u00e1n\u2019s passivity, a common thread running through these vastly different experiences is his lack of control and the random nature of the most influential moments in his life. From helping his neighbor out with groceries to hearing the shouts of a man getting mugged in an alley, random and sometimes mundane moments are pivotal in Istv\u00e1n\u2019s story.<\/p>\n
Because so little information about Istv\u00e1n\u2019s feelings is given to us, we are left to determine his emotions based on his interactions with others, people with whom he rarely shares more than a few words. We get the sense that Istv\u00e1n thinks, as we do at the beginning of the novel, that his life is meant to be totally unimportant, and that he only becomes elite, rich and notable by chance. He was meant to stay in his unnamed Hungarian town, or die in the army, or stay a bouncer for a strip club \u2014 a forgettable worker like dozens of others from the former Iron Curtain in the early days of the European Union. But once Istv\u00e1n comes to believe that he actually deserves this improbable life, it all comes crashing down. We have little control over our own destinies, Szalay seems to tell us \u2014 it\u2019s arrogant to think that we ever did.<\/p>\n
As Istv\u00e1n grows older, he seems to stop having any actual wants, a progression of the passivity instilled in him from his youth. All of his actions are driven by either survival or compulsion, and so are his relationships. Other people want things from Istv\u00e1n, but he seems to live on the surface of his own life, with no plans or dreams beyond the next day, or night, or\u00a0weekend at the beach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That is until, like countless other driftless middle-aged men, someone comes along in his life whom he cares about very, very much. But even still, he finds he cannot control the fate of his relationship; Istv\u00e1n has no control over even the most cherished thing in his life, the way he\u2019s had no control over anything this whole time. Whether Istv\u00e1n is an especially passive person or whether we all have less control than we\u2019d like to think, Szalay leaves us to figure it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Szalay\u2019s greatest strength in \u201cFlesh\u201d might be his ability to fluidly transition between these different Istv\u00e1ns. We read as Istv\u00e1n matures from a lonely teenager into a wealthy man without losing a sense of who he is on the inside. Despite receiving little detail about Istv\u00e1n\u2019s inner world, we understand his feelings of isolation and shame as he navigates masculinity and his compulsion toward his carnal desires. Istv\u00e1n tries to figure out what makes someone masculine \u2014 violence, strength, desire, fatherhood \u2014 but never really can, and we watch him cycle in and out of self-destruction as he vainly searches. At the same time, we watch him love and lose intensely, which Szalay manages to portray as both Istv\u00e1n\u2019s attempt to find control and a deeply personal, human journey that feels bitingly real.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cFlesh\u201d is a portrait of a man\u2019s life that is both painfully intimate and stubbornly opaque. Because of the lack of detail, much of the story is left to be imagined by the reader, just as Istv\u00e1n and the other characters imagine things about each other. By the end of \u201cFlesh,\u201d what lingers is not any single moment in Istv\u00e1n\u2019s life but a haunting sense that we have glimpsed something true about human life and futility. \u201cFlesh\u201d captures how we move through the world, often half-seeing ourselves and others. Szalay\u2019s unsettling, clear-eyed perspective on life, isolation and modern masculinity makes \u201cFlesh\u201d stand out as a strong contender for this year\u2019s Booker Prize.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daily Arts Writer Claire Rock and Daily Arts Contributor Elias Simon can be reached at rockcl@umich.edu<\/a> and <\/em> elmsimon@umich.edu<\/em><\/a>, respectively. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like writers of The Michigan Daily Book Review\u00a0past, our fearless reviewers are once again tackling the\u00a0Booker Prize Shortlist. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year\u2019s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3523,3530,695,3531],"class_list":{"0":"post-3487","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-david","9":"tag-flesh","10":"tag-review","11":"tag-szalay"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3489,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions\/3489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}