IT has been a banner year for Hungarian writers, and by extension, Hungarian literature. In October, László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature—the world’s most prestigious literary honour—accompanied by a monetary award of 1 million Swedish kronor (SEK), equivalent to roughly US$1.17 million. Only two months later, his compatriot David Szalay received the International Booker Prize for his novel Flesh (Jonathan Cape, £25.53), the subject of this review.
Perhaps these accolades signal a broader renaissance in contemporary Hungarian letters; time will tell. What Flesh makes immediately clear, however, is a decisive turn away from the gimmicky post-modernism that so often works against a reader’s desire for pleasure, coherence or vision. Too many award-winning novels today mistake density for depth, enshrining simplicity beneath layers of prose so thick that meaning becomes a chore to excavate. Such writing can feel impenetrable—no axe sharp enough to split it—leaving the reader dazed, alienated and tempted to abandon the book altogether. Reading these novels often resembles Sisyphean labour, failing the most basic requirement of fiction: to entertain.
Flesh is a throwback in the best sense. It is a novel of life, rendered in full, with its peaks and valleys intact. It is at once an immigrant story, a love story and, ultimately, a tragedy; a novel deeply concerned with filial bonds and the consequences of their erosion. Szalay’s work carries the sweep and moral resonance of Philip Roth at his best, recalling the social scope of American Pastoral alongside the fleshly, transgressive energy of Sabbath’s Theater. Stripped of post-modern filigree, Flesh reads as an honest novel. Szalay avoids the contemporary impulse to over-psychologise—where every impulse is assigned a diagnosis, every action reduced to pathology, and the author’s hand becomes visible behind the strings. Too much literary fiction today reads like an annotated edition of the DSM. Flesh refreshingly does not.
The novel’s protagonist is István, whom we first meet as an unremarkable fifteen-year-old in a small Hungarian town. Awkward and isolated amid his sexual awakening, István is seduced by an older woman—the wife of his employer. The affair lasts nearly a year before she abruptly ends it. Shattered, István spirals into obsession. He follows her, confronts her and eventually arrives at her home. When her husband answers the door, a verbal dispute escalates into a physical struggle. István pushes the man down the stairs; he strikes his head and dies.
This violent rupture determines the trajectory of István’s life. He is committed to a psychiatric facility, later deployed as a soldier to Iraq and eventually emigrates to England. There, he struggles, marries well and has a son. He grows wealthy, loses everything and ultimately returns to where he began. The narrative is circuitous, marked by abrupt temporal leaps and unflinching descriptions of sex. The title Flesh is no accident: the word signifies not merely carnality, but the blunt, embodied fact of human existence.
Walt Whitman once wrote in “A Woman Waits for Me”, “all were lacking if sex were lacking,” continuing:
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations…
All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,
These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.
Whitman suggests that pleasure affirms our presence in the world—that intimacy is not a diversion from life, but its confirmation. Flesh advances a related idea: that what we seek in moments of loneliness, boredom or despair is not simply sex, but flesh itself—the proximity of another body, the reassurance of touch, scent and warmth. Flesh is our most elemental comfort; without it, we drift.
István loses nearly everything over the course of the novel—his wife, his son, his security. Yet Szalay resists the temptation to anatomise his grief. István possesses the immigrant’s dexterity: a hard-earned resilience that allows him to endure, adapt and move forward without indulgence or self-pity.
Flesh is a bildungsroman of the highest order. Lyrical, unsentimental and rich with insight into living, loving and dying, it rejects the fashionable contrivances of its contemporaries in favour of something rarer: a true distillation of a human life. It is a memorable and deeply entertaining achievement, and a thoroughly deserving recipient of the Booker Prize.
