David Szalay is the author of four previous works of fiction: Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, and All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Budapest.
Why do you tell stories?
Because I enjoy it, first of all. I think what first made me want to be a writer was enjoying being a reader – that is, enjoying being told stories by other people, enjoying all the little games and strategies that that involves.
On another level, of course, there’s something else – the attempt to understand our lives through narratives, and through writing. Writing, in a way, is a form of thinking. By that I don’t necessarily mean that it directly expresses concrete abstract thoughts. I mean that describing the character of István, for example, is a way of thinking about life and the world. Fidelity to experience is important if those thoughts are to have any value – or are to be interesting, which might be just another way of saying the same thing.
How are you hoping the reader will respond to István being such an opaque and unreadable character?
Is he opaque? Is he unreadable? In a way he seems quite straightforward to me. It’s true that he does not ‘unpack his heart with words’, as Hamlet puts it – and I did want a character who wasn’t continually explaining himself to the reader. I suppose more than anything, I would like the reader to find some measure of sympathy for him. Beyond that, he is what he is.
Each discrete facet of István’s life explored in the novel could work as a standalone short story. Did you become aware of this structure throughout the course of writing the work, or is it what you set out to achieve?
It’s something I set out to achieve. I think that in the process of writing my earlier book All That Man Is, I became slightly addicted to the idea of the sub-novel-length standalone story. As a result even when I was contemplating writing a more traditionally structured full-length novel I still found myself thinking in terms of these discrete episodes. But it’s more than that of course – I think they serve the larger narrative well. Each episode presents a few weeks or months of István's life with quite intense immediacy. Within each episode, we are always in the present, and the book is written in the present tense. But the narrative as an over-arching whole deals in years and decades, as the short episodes accumulate. I think this mirrors something essential about the way that we experience time, and that the book as a result feels true to that experience and manages to express certain important facets of it, like the way we both stay somehow the same throughout our adult lives while also continually and incrementally changing.
Throughout the course of the novel, and István’s life, one of the strengths of Flesh is how huge themes (Europe, migration, Covid) are dealt with so pertinently yet elliptically, so we wonder if choosing a man as the vessel to carry the story was, in some way, your way of obliquely commenting on current thinking around contemporary masculinity?
I don’t want to overstate this but yes, the book is to some extent about contemporary masculinity. Having said that, I didn’t approach it with any sort of abstract theory of the subject, or any particular point of view on it that I wanted to get across. Obviously I was aware that it was something that would probably crop up given the nature of the story and the characters (István himself of course, but also Thomas). When I was writing the book I did generally try to avoid material that too directly addressed ‘masculinity’ as an issue – I wanted anything that the book might have to say on the subject to arise naturally from the narrative. I think that the word ‘masculinity’ itself only appears once in the whole novel. It appeared twice at the final proof stage (and therefore in the proof copies that were sent out) but the passage containing the second instance was cut, precisely because I felt it came over as slightly forced and schematic.
Your hypnotic use of language was the most striking aspect of Flesh for many of our readers here. Was this pared-back style a conscious decision for Flesh, or does the story itself, and István's character even, dictate the rhythm and syntax of the writing?
I think the nature of István as a person is an important part of it. Or to put it another way – the style of the book is an element of its characterisation of him. That’s always true in novels I think, even when it doesn’t quite work or when the writer isn’t aware it. There were other aspects to it though. I wanted to use a language that was mostly concrete and precise. That mostly dealt with physical experience. That dealt with emotional experience mostly obliquely. And then there’s the habit of writing ‘short’ that I picked up while working on my previous book, Turbulence, a collection of short stories originally written for the radio, where each story was strictly limited to 2000 words…
Can you explain your thinking, or indeed your publisher’s, around the choice of Flesh as a title?
Flesh was the working title of the book – it was literally the name of the Word file on my laptop while I was writing it. At that point I wasn’t really envisaging it as the title of the finished book. My assumption was that, in consultation with the publishers, I would eventually come up with something more ‘literary’ than that. And we did try. When that didn’t work I started to think about Flesh as an actual possibility. It does have a sort of tawdry quality, something almost vulgar about it, which made it feel like a slightly risky choice. It made people uneasy. Then someone (it was my U.S. agent Bill Clegg) suggested that that uneasiness was actually a good thing, something to embrace rather than run away from. I think he was probably right about that. And of course there was a reason why I’d alighted on Flesh as a working title in the first place. It does express, in a single word, something fundamental about the book’s subject.
What books have you read recently? What books are currently on your to be read pile?
I have recently read Tessa Hadley’s The Party and Emma Cline’s The Guest, both of which are excellent. And I’ve just started Francois Mauriac’s Thérèse. I found an old Penguin copy in the bargain bin of a second-hand book-shop and liked the look of it. I’ve not read him before, and didn’t know, until I looked at the cover notes, that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but so far, so good. Next up will probably be Edward St Aubyn’s new novel, Parallel Lines.