Flesh is a good title. It grabs you. You want it. Which is also how Szalay writes. It’s quasi Pinteresque. Succinct. But enigmatic. Riveting. Absorbing. Ambiguous. Flesh is a book that talks about the here and now. In a way. The little man and where the little man might fit. Into the here and now. Where does he fit? Is he little? These are the questions the book might be asking. István is that little man. But he is also, in his way, exceptional. He kills. He saves lives. He ascends. It’s a dizzying ascent and the novel dizzies. And then?
And then comes the novel’s get-out-of-jail card.
There’s something faintly Hemingway about the book, in an understated fashion. Heroic deeds and terse sentences. Flesh reveals something of our world. And it hides away from other things. But it does all of this with precision and efficiency. As though the writer is constructing a machine. Which might just be his protagonist.
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