{"id":564211,"date":"2025-11-11T19:38:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T19:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/564211\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T19:38:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T19:38:12","slug":"its-notoriously-hard-to-write-about-sex-david-szalay-on-flesh-his-astounding-booker-prize-winner-david-szalay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/564211\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s notoriously hard to write about sex\u2019: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner | David Szalay"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year\u2019s Booker prize<\/a>, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.<\/p>\n

Szalay (pronounced \u201cSol-oy\u201d) is often described as \u201cHungarian-British\u201d, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. \u201cI\u2019m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.\u201d Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.<\/p>\n

Brexit will cause very deep changes in the psychology of this\u00a0country<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For many years, Szalay has been critically acclaimed as \u201ca writers\u2019 writer\u201d. In 2013 he was named one of Granta\u2019s Best of Young British Novelists. There was always a sense that he deserved to be better known. In the past 12 months, he has had a baby and won the Booker prize<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s not a year I\u2019m gonna forget,\u201d he says, his voice scratchy from lack of sleep and all the talking he\u2019s already had to do this morning.<\/p>\n

Last night was not his first experience of the agonising Booker ceremony. In 2016 he was shortlisted for All That Man Is<\/a>, an interlinked collection of nine stories about men of different ages, from all over Europe, which provoked controversy as to whether it counted as a novel. It was a \u201cvery, very stressful evening\u201d he says. This time he decided \u201cto sort of hypnotise\u201d himself into believing that he hadn\u2019t won. \u201cI maybe succeeded almost too well,\u201d he says. \u201cI was eerily calm \u2013 and then when it did indeed happen, I was slightly shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flesh was born of the failure of a novel he had been working on for four years. Partly this was due to the pressure of the attention that All That Man Is had received. Also: \u201cthe central concept was wrong.\u201d Szalay had written 100,000 words before finally abandoning it. \u201cThere was an enormous feeling of relief, as well as trepidation that I now had to start with something else,\u201d he says. \u201cTo abandon two books in quick succession would start to seem terminal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019d tried to hypnotise myself\u2019 \u2026 Szalay with Queen Camilla at a Booker prize reception yesterday. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau\/Reuters<\/p>\n

He wanted to write a novel that straddled England and Hungary, to reflect his feelings of being \u201cemotionally marooned between the two countries\u201d. He also wanted to write about \u201cthe physicality of existence\u201d, he says. \u201cObviously, it\u2019s part of every story, but it\u2019s very rarely prominent as an idea.\u201d He opened a new Word document and gave it the working title Flesh. The title seemed very \u201cunliterary\u201d, he says, and it made his editor nervous. But in the end, they all agreed it suited the pervasive unease of the novel and its central preoccupation \u2013 the body.<\/p>\n

The unforgettable opening chapter came first, almost as a short story. Fifteen-year-old Istv\u00e1n is living in a new town on a Hungarian estate with his single mother. A 42-year-old neighbour seduces him and an altercation with her husband ends in disaster. \u201cI would certainly read the second chapter,\u201d Szalay says. \u201cSo I then thought, \u2018How can we move this on?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Move on it does, at speed. Istv\u00e1n spends time in a juvenile detention centre, then as part of the Hungarian army in the Iraq war. Both these experiences happen off stage. The next time we meet him he is working as a doorman for a club in London. He then gets a job as a chauffeur for a preposterously wealthy man. He becomes preposterously wealthy himself. To tell more would be to give too much away. A lot of things happen to Istv\u00e1n, most of them very bad. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be a coward. I didn\u2019t want to shirk, or to leave out things that were quite extreme,\u201d he says. \u201cObviously it\u2019s totally contemporary in its surface, but underneath that, I did conceive it as something akin to a Greek tragedy, in which the hero has to be thoroughly put through the wringer in order to reach his point of catharsis.\u201d The reader is put through the wringer too.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve been as matter-of-fact as I can\u2019.\u2019 Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Szalay\u2019s subject, honed over six novels and 15 years, is masculinity: what it means to be a man today, with an inevitable emphasis on sex, violence and money. In 2025, these are not obviously Booker-prize-winning themes. For years, writers were desperate to be anointed \u201cthe new Martin Amis\u201d, but now it would be considered slightly shaming. As he said in his speech on Monday, Szalay knew he was writing a risky novel. \u201cOne of the risks I was taking was to write about sex from a very specifically male perspective, and to try to do that as honestly as possible.\u201d We see Istv\u00e1n smoke and have sex. Sometimes he eats. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult, notoriously, to write about sex,\u201d the author says. \u201cI tried to write about it as matter-of-factly as possible.\u201d Sex and anger, he explains, are largely \u201cnon-verbal experiences\u201d \u2013 and often the most intense challenge for a novelist, as \u201cyou have to deal with everything verbally, unless you leave a blank page\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s akin to Greek tragedy. The hero\u00a0has to be\u00a0thoroughly put through the\u00a0wringer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Istv\u00e1n himself is almost a blank space on the page. We have no idea what he looks like, although women are all too ready to sleep with him. (This is his curse.) We don\u2019t know what he thinks or why he does things \u2013 and neither, it seems, does he. He is a man of few words. Never has \u201cOK\u201d been deployed so often (about 500 times, apparently) or so meaningfully in a work of literary fiction. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the main aspects of the characterisation,\u201d Szalay says. \u201cI very specifically didn\u2019t want a character who unpacked themselves for the reader, either reliably or unreliably.\u201d The result is a triumph of relentless exteriority and brutal realism, at once tragic and comic in its banality.<\/p>\n

Wary of the novel being \u201cpigeonholed\u201d as just a treatise on men, Szalay edited out most of the overt references to masculinity. \u201cI hope that it\u2019s about much more than that,\u201d he says. \u201cI hope the book is very emotionally impactful \u2013 and that only works if it feels very real to the reader.\u201d He succeeds. It is a feat of authorial magic that he manages to make us care so deeply about a protagonist who is so unknowable that at a crucial moment of moral reckoning, we are uncertain how he will behave.<\/p>\n

For all the novel\u2019s fixation on the body, Istv\u00e1n exists in a specific historical moment. Spanning roughly the author\u2019s lifetime, the novel mentions external events, from the Iraq war to migration from eastern Europe to west, and up to the pandemic, to show how our lives are shaped by political and socioeconomic forces beyond our control. \u201cThe end of communism, Hungary joining the EU, those two things completely transformed life for Hungarians,\u201d he says. \u201cBrexit will cause very deep changes in the psychology of the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Szalay is very happy to call himself a European novelist. Having spent most of his writing career in Hungary and now in Austria, he describes himself as a \u201cliterary hermit\u201d. He doesn\u2019t really speak German, he says, and isn\u2019t part of any bookish scene. In previous interviews, it is possible to detect his frustration at the sameness of much contemporary fiction. Certainly, he has no time for the traditional form. \u201cThat sort of Russian novel that begins with the main character\u2019s grandparents, and slowly works up to their birth about 200 pages in \u2013 that\u2019s probably not my favourite sort,\u201d he admits. \u201cI prefer more compressed or concise novels, books that don\u2019t tell you everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is no surprise to learn that Ernest Hemingway and John Updike were favourites when he was growing up. \u201cVirginia Woolf is an influence, too,\u201d he says. \u201cI read equally as many novels by women as by men.\u201d He is already halfway through his next book, which \u201cpartly\u201d involves a female perspective, he says laughing.<\/p>\n

He had planned to spend this day in London with his wife. Instead, she is returning to Vienna and their baby while he stays on to talk about masculinity. It is the first time they have left their son with other people (his aunts). \u201cI think this is probably a good moment to do that,\u201d Szalay says. Winning the Booker is surely a good excuse for calling in the babysitters. \u201cI really didn\u2019t know how people were going to take the book,\u201d he says of his win. \u201cI\u2019m proud that it has connected with so many people.\u201d<\/p>\n