Flesh by David Szalay

Published 2025 · 368 pages · 81,417 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Flesh to read?

Flesh scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
Szalay writes in plain, spare contemporary English with brand names, food names and everyday objects, and little beyond dialogue-level words. It sits close to the simple register of Beach Read or It Ends with Us, with a little more precision in the descriptions.
Sentence structure: 24 out of 100
Sentences are short, often single-line paragraphs, and dialogue is repetitive and clipped. A few longer reflective passages, such as Helen's reasoning about money or the tennis game, add some complexity.
Abstraction: 36 out of 100
The book is concrete: bodies, rooms, cars, pools, hospital corridors, with ideas about class and desire left implicit. István's inner reflections occasionally reach for something larger, but events carry the weight.
Information density: 34 out of 100
The text is sparse, with little new information per page, though its eras and settings cover Hungary, Iraq and London and the details of each are specific. It reads fast, closer to Beach Read than to Sebald.
Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
István rarely says what he feels, and the narration records surface behaviour while the reader infers shame, loneliness and desire. The pull of the unspoken is similar to The Remains of the Day, though the plot itself is easy to follow.
Symbolic density: 38 out of 100
There is a restrained set of motifs such as suits, cigarettes, stairwells and shared food, but nothing is allegorical. It sits near The Remains of the Day in its restraint.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Szalay's deadpan narration lets class and power dynamics speak for themselves, for instance Mervyn's grooming, Helen's 'the help' joke and the National Gallery visit. The irony is dry and quiet rather than satirical.
Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
Within the supplied text, major threads such as the first affair's aftermath, Karl's illness and Thomas's resentment stay tense and unresolved. The novel's episodic life-span structure offers little closure and leaves István's inner life open.
Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
The book moves chronologically through seven numbered episodes across decades, with time jumps and a shift in point of view to Helen and others in later chapters. The progression is clear compared with Flights or 2666.

How Flesh is regarded

Flesh holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Flesh sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (151 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Flesh scores 76 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
‘Okay,’ he says, after a few seconds. He doesn’t know why he says that. Some part of him seems to want to.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
The lift smells of cigarette smoke.
Mythos: Irony Phase 4 (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
And yet she doesn’t even know what happened that day in March.
Genre: Novel
It’s nearly nine when he brings the Mercedes round from the mews and waits for Mr or Mrs Nyman to need him.

Where the story of Flesh takes place

  • London, Hertfordshire and Munich: security work, the Nymans, Rainham, 2005-2021 (2005 to 2021), the main setting
  • Hungarian panel-flat town, early 1990s (1991 to 1992)
  • Hungary after the young offenders' institution, c. 1995-1998 (1995 to 1998)
  • Kuwait and Iraq with the Hungarian contingent, 2003-2004 (2003 to 2004)
  • Hungarian provincial town, Media Markt years, 2021-2032 (2021 to 2032)

5 things that are true of Flesh, with the passage for each

  1. The neighbour who becomes István's lover is forty-two.

    ‘How old are you?’ he asks her. ‘Forty-two,’ she says.

  2. Noémi tells István she has slept with twenty-three people.

    She thinks for quite a long time, sort of marking things off on her fingers, and then says, ‘Twenty-three.’

  3. The close-protection course Mervyn pays for costs over a thousand pounds.

    to get the SIA licence he first needs to do a two-week training course in close-protection techniques that costs more than a thousand pounds.

  4. The Nyman trust fund had already lent István's projects about eighty million pounds.

    ‘Until this year, about…about eighty million pounds,’ she says.

  5. István sees Thomas's lips turn blue as he overdoses and does not go in.

    After another minute, there’s no doubt. Thomas’s lips are distinctly blue.

Scenes in Flesh that Frye would name

33 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
there’s a strange loud sound as his head hits it further down, and then he’s lying on the concrete floor of the half-landing, next to his wife’s plants, and he doesn’t get up. The neighbour's husband dies in the stairwell, the book's founding death.
Agon, untitled
The violence with which he threw himself on Thomas and knocked him to the floor. The physical climax of the Thomas conflict, at the Gagosian.
Pathos, untitled
A fox darts out, Helen swerves to avoid it, and skids into the path of an oncoming van. The accident that kills Jacob and leaves Helen in a coma, told with deliberate understatement.
Agon, untitled
There’s a scuffle on the landing. The fatal fight on the stairs with the husband.
Hamartia, untitled
Sure that she is there and that her husband just wants to prevent him from seeing her, István tries to push past him into the flat. His obsessive misreading of the situation leads to the fatal push.
Pathos, untitled
When Riki lost consciousness he wasn’t sure if he’d died or what. Riki's death on the Al-Suwaira road, retold in therapy.

Books that share these scenes with Flesh

About the author

David Szalay