Flesh, David Szalay

The Booker Prize winner for 2025. Flesh follows a Hungarian bodyguard, István, whose physical presence opens doors into the lives of Europe’s wealthy elite as he drifts through relationships shaped by desire, power, and status.  It’s an unsentimental meditation on embodiment, power, and the quiet humiliations that shape a man’s life. The novel follows István, a Hungarian laborer as he moves through the shifting landscapes of post–Cold War Europe. Szalay’s prose is almost clinically detached. Beneath that surface runs an inquiry into what it means to inhabit a body in a world governed by capital, class, and desire. The book seemed to me to be about the existential burden of being seen primarily as a body. István’s physical presence grants him access to opportunity and intimacy, yet it also reduces and estranges him from any stable sense of self. Szalay may have been suggesting that modern masculinity is less an identity than a transaction?

The novel resonates with a quiet fatalism reminiscent of European existentialism: freedom exists, but it is circumscribed by economics, accident, and temperament. István drifts throughout, compelled more by circumstance than by vision. Szalay poses a subtle but terrific question: how much of a life is authored, and how much is merely endured?