→ February 13, 2026
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Flesh.

David Szalay’s Flesh is an alienated novel about alienation: It keeps the reader at arm’s length from its main character, István, a young Hungarian man with no apparent morality or values who acts on impulse for most of his life. The spartan prose, especially the dialogue, helps create an atmosphere of futility and disaffection, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, but doesn’t ask any questions of itself, neither its protagonist or its world, to explain his feelings or his actions in a meaningful way. It won the 2025 Booker Prize, beating out books by previous winner Kiran Desai as well as Susan Choi.

When we meet István, he’s a 15-year-old living in a public housing project in Hungary who, after a friend tries to get him to lose his virginity with another girl they know, ends up groomed into a ‘relationship’ by an adult woman neighbor – although this is just statutory rape. This ends in violence that leads to István serving time in juvenile detention and then as a soldier in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which further hardens him; while there, he saw one of his close friends killed by an IED, later receiving an honor for his own efforts in the same incident. Upon his discharge, he moves to London, works in private security, and ends up in a relationship with the wife of his wealthy boss, leading to an elevation in his social status that he can’t match with any change in his attitudes, language, or ultimately his behavior.

Life largely happens to István; he perseveres but has almost no initiative, and the most active thing he does – the crime that gets him sent to prison early in the book – is an accident. He almost fails upwards, going from someone who doesn’t even know what sex is when the novel opens to someone who falls backwards into it by the time his boss’s wife seduces him. The pervasive anomie throughout the novel provides some context, although Szalay seems to be telling us that the world is making men like István – the incel argument, although he is certainly not celibate – rather than making István responsible for at least some of his own actions. He’s born poor, with fewer choices than someone born into more privilege, but he doesn’t lack agency entirely.

Much of the praise for Flesh has been for its ascetic prose, which does make the book a very quick read, while also preventing it from becoming leaden with its aimless protagonist and depressing plot. The sparseness is primarily in the dialogue; István is a man of few words, but none of the characters is especially garrulous. Szalay also creates paragraphs of a single sentence – “The news is disorienting,” “It’s already getting dark” – that make the book a faster read, but also don’t imprint anything on the mind. The words rolled off me, even when I sort of found some meaning in the story.

Flesh is built on a foundation of toxic masculinity. Is it, however, an indictment of toxic masculinity itself, or of the so-called masculinity crisis, which is (in my opinion) largely manufactured by, well, men. Szalay presents István as a man with limited options, not with no options. He seems to be making the case that society as a whole has lost its centers that provided young men with direction or purpose. Religion is dying. Traditional male job paths have declined. The man as head-of-household is no longer the dominant family paradigm. István goes into the military, which might be the one traditionally male or masculine field that’s at least similar to what it was fifty years ago, and it’s the only major event in István’s life that provides him with structure and meaning – and it’s accompanied by trauma. One of the Booker Prize judges said that István is “struggling to gain control of his life.” I could buy that if I saw any of the struggle.

Next up: About halfway through Petersburg by Andrei Bely, who for some reason is listed as “Deceased Andrei Bely” on Bookshop.

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→ June 10, 2014
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Tranquility.

My draft analyses went up over several days, so here’s a link to the key columns:

* Draft recaps for AL teams
* Draft recaps for NL teams
* Friday’s Klawchat, which came during rounds 3-4
* Day one reactions, covering just rounds 1 and 2

I’ll have one more draft-related post on Thursday and then it’s time to turn the page.

I’m not even sure where I heard about Attila Bartis’ book Tranquility, the only one of Bartis’ books available in English. Born in Transylvania but of Hungarian descent, Bartis has won several major awards for Hungarian literature, including a prize named for the writer Sándor Márai, whose book Embers appeared on the second version of my top 100 novels ranking, although it was pushed off in the most recent update.

Tranquility has nothing in common with the subtle Embers; instead, it beats the reader over the head with obscenity, taking its cue from Portnoy’s Complaint but upping the ante of demented familial relationships while shifting to the setting of post-communist Hungary. The Weers, the family at the center of Bartis’ work, are a new kind of train wreck. Narrated by the son, Andor, who lives with his reclusive mother, Tranquility jumps backward to retrace the Weers’ descent into a sort of controlled depravity while Andor attempts to sever his dysfunctional and possibly incestuous relationship with his mother so he can begin a new relationship with the troubled Eszter. Andor uncovers very uncomfortable truths about his own family history, including his father’s disappearance, followed by his sister’s, and learns that sexual misdeeds are sown deep in his lineage, along with madness, betrayal, and emotional and physical violence.

Reading Tranquility would have been a chore given its callous and graphic depictions of sex, violence, and the intersection between the two, but Bartis infuses the novel with black humor and what I believe was an angry metaphorical depiction of Hungary’s own difficult transition from communism to something like democracy. (I have no idea if this was Bartis’ intent, but the interpretation came to me pretty easily and I doubt it’s a coincidence.) That transition led to economic upheaval that hasn’t ended, along with the paradoxical desire by part of the population to return to the certain misery of authoritarian rule rather than the uncertain freedom of its post-communist government. In this interpretation, Andor’s mother represents the communist past from which the Hungarian population refuses or is unwilling to fully leave behind; Ezster, herself a victim in multiple senses who has several difficulties with conception and pregnancy, is herself a symbol of freedom, volatile and damaged, capable of evoking emotions in Andor with which he is uncomfortable or flat-out unfamiliar. Breaking with his mother involves coming to terms with awful events from the family’s past, known and unknown; forging a real relationship with Eszter, however, requires emotional depth and strength the callous Andor lacks. To make matters worse, Eszter introduces Andor, a writer by trade, to an editor, Eva Jordan, with whom Andor engages in a violent affair. Eva is his mother’s age, and Andor appears to be unable to stop himself from giving in to his hate-filled desires for her – or to revisit the relative certainty of the past. Even if the past was lousy, at least you knew what you were getting. The message seems to be that freedom is scary because it’s unpredictable; the “tranquility” of the title is ironic, clearly, as there’s nothing tranquil about this screwed-up mother-son relationship, but also refers to the safety of a life without upside.

Where Bartis diverges from the tradition of lunatic families and sexual perversion launched by Portnoy’s Complaint and more recently revived by Alessandro Piperno is in its association of sex with violence. Where Roth and Piperno use sex (especially masturbation) for laughs, Bartis’ depictions of sex are rife with violence, whether it’s outright violence as with Eva Jordan or emotionally violent as with Eszter, and Andor’s reactions after sex are shockingly clinical. It’s discomfiting, but I doubt Bartis wanted the reader to ever feel comfortable in a story about life in Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Next up: I finished Atul Gawande’s brief The Checklist Manifesto last week and have moved on to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Dispossessed.

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→ August 5, 2008
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Embers.

I first learned about Sándor Márai’s Embers through this peculiar list of the top ten novels in Eastern European literature (according to Tibor Fischer), part of a long series of literary top tens that the Guardian has run. Márai’s stood out as one that was short, available in English, and Hungarian, a country that has always fascinated me, both before and after my 2003 pilgrimage to Budapest. I bought the book, and then reader Amy asked (randomly) in a recent chat whether I’d heard of the book, a sure sign that it was time to crack it open.

Embers itself is an unbelievably simple and powerful story, with just three main characters, one of whom is dead but who appears in flashbacks. The two living characters, both now in their mid-70s, meet for the first time in forty-one years as the visitor, Konrad, has returned from a self-imposed exile. Henrik, his host and formerly his closest friend, receives Konrad with cold hospitality and a long but spellbinding harangue on their friendship, Konrad’s exile, and the event that triggered Henrik’s flight.

There’s almost no action, and what action there is occurs in cut scenes where we meet Krisztina, the late wife of Henrik, and discover the key differences in Konrad’s and Henrik’s upbringings. Márai replaces action with the gradual unfolding of secrets and the stories that bound the three characters together and then drove them apart. Along the way, Henrik muses (to Konrad) on the nature of anger, betrayal, and vengeance. It’s a deep psychological novel in the tradition of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but in a much more manageable package. For those of you still in school, it would lend itself well to an analysis of how Marai uses environmental factors such as light, temperature, and weather to reflect or even set the moods of the book’s various scenes.

To say more of the characters would be to risk spoiling the plot, if I haven’t done too much of that already. If you can stand a book that is all talk and no action, but is gripping all the same, Embers is worth the three or four hours it will take you to tear through it.

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