British novelist David Szalay is carving out his own path with a writing style as gravely denuded as any I have read. Rarely is there any description and when there is, it emerges as austere and beautiful. Much of the action resides in the dialogue between characters, a dialogue replete with much unsaid. Flesh, his sixth, follows a Hungarian naif from poverty through the army, thence to England where blind luck brings him untold riches and the chance for love. Of course what follows, laid out with wonderful ploy dynamics, is a descent. I found the main character tormented me with his blind stumbling through life, and the bare-as-bones writing style often threatens to derail readerly identification, but the unrelenting, grand-scale-yet-intimate plot can read like a thriller. Our antihero wrestles with themes of fate and morality and responsibility, in a world seemingly cold as ice. Overall, Flesh is difficult to recommend to many readers but it possesses a magic I shall remember.
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