"Teenaged Istvâan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor--a married woman close to his mother's age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands--as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvâan himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident thatleaves a man dead. What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees Istvâan emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London's billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, Istvâan is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant "success story," brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay's keen observation"--

Flesh is a weird book. What Szalay has created is essentially a story told from a limited perspective, that of Istvan, a repressed young man developed in familial and then wartime trauma, as Istvan goes from rags-to-riches-to-rags again. Szalay's project is clearly to have Istvan develop and move through his world using only his limited reflection and introspection and thus show how the serious turns and troubles of his life affect some who has little to no awareness of his own emotions or thinking process. We can't say that Szalay fails at this task -- the tone of the book is incredibly controlled and the author does a good job showing Istvan grow and change despite his lack of interior monologue about it. In particular, moments when Istvan faces moral dilemmas are handled with very nice complexity and ambiguity. But that didn't make the work compelling to read. Part of the issue was that the plot just made some blunt and obvious choices to increase Istvan's suffering -- deux ex machinas that really strain credulity -- and it's hard to stay connected to the novel when it's so obvious that Szalay is pulling our emotions. But maybe more critically, it's just not that interesting to read a work where the protagonist's default response to everything is 'okay.' It's not that authors can't tell rich and complex stories with minimal writing -- we are big fans of Rachel Cusk here at NUBClub -- but this protagonist is just so flat that much of the book is boring to read. While we agree that Istvan's view of the world is a common one among men and/or depressives (we argued about which of those, if not the combination, was Szalay's focus here), that isn't content that makes a novel work. Given how bland so much of the book is, it's hard for us to see how this was the Man Booker winner this year. We can only think that the rarity of the perspective in literature -- the fact that we don't see this kind of man as a protagonist in a limited perspective work -- is what pushed it over the top. But here at NUBClub, no one would recommend it to anyone. It's not a bad book -- it's an experiment in point-of-view that's very diligent and often skillful, but doesn't quite work.