David Szalay
"Nella Carne"

THE REVIEW

One of the biggest publishing phenomena of 2025, the novel "Flesh," in Italian "Nella Carne," by the Canadian-born, Hungarian-naturalized author David Szalay.
The entirety of the author's bibliography has been published in Italy—four novels, including the one in question, and two anthologies of short stories—by Adelphi.

A rarefied bildungsroman about a casual traveler and adventurer, from Hungary (only to eventually return there), to Iraq as a volunteer soldier in the "Coalition of the Willing," and finally to the United Kingdom, spanning the 1990s of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first; the story begins just after the opening up to Western customs in the U.S.S.R. following Perestroika, and concludes three years after the end of the international lockdown of 2020.

The characters are drawn starting from their omissions.

The protagonist, István, is narrated by an omniscient, invisible third-person narrator, through the revelation of his sporadic thoughts (at least as they appear narratively sporadic) and his encounters with other characters, in a fragmented way, mostly by describing episodes from his biography.

Differently from the metaphysical heroes of mutism, from the annihilation wrought through the maturing of thought like Bartleby by Melville or Mersault by Camus, Szalay’s István appears preconscious, depersonalized if it weren’t for being so deeply biological (central in his life are the perpetuation of sex and physical aggression), perpetually unmotivated; he reaches his (non)individuality at the end of History (of the former Soviet bloc, of Capitalism, of human relationships, of language), a History that nonetheless seems to have nothing to do with him.

At times, it is the other characters, the most important within the synopsis, who become bearers of thoughts that István seems to accept as his own, giving his formal assent with his "yes," "ok," like Helen, whom he will meet in London and who will become the most important woman in his life.
The cultural superstructures themselves seem to be emanations of the cognitive possibilities of bodies.

"She tells him that her husband’s relatives—his sister Mathilde, for example—were all convinced that she had married him << only >> for his money. What they didn’t realize, she says, is how difficult it is to determine to what extent money influenced her choice. On one hand, it’s undeniable that if he hadn’t been so wealthy, she wouldn’t have found him so fascinating, but the fact remains that to her, he was, and she thought she loved him. In other words, it’s not that she didn’t like him and was only interested in his money. It was more complicated than that. His wealth helped make him seem fascinating to her, but it’s impossible to determine exactly how much, so what’s the point in asking, especially since, in the end, this uncertainty about precisely what attracts one person to another applies to any such decision, any decision about who we choose to spend our lives with."

Betraying the promise of the prosperous man, like Barry Lyndon by Thackeray (and inevitably by Stanley Kubrick as well), of whom István seems a random, paradoxical version—a social climber and "self-made man"—is an act of altruism, performed without the clear warning of a will.
The decision to save the life of the person whose death would have saved him from ruin.

Without recrimination or ennobling of actions, last among these being this human rescue—actions that seem perpetually gratuitous and self-driven, through the inner movements of this strange beast the protagonist inhabits, his body—even though they seem to have an emotional aftereffect over time in another part of the narrative, which not coincidentally opens and closes in the same way, in the same context, as if forming a parabola.

"To the new and surprising things his body wanted, and to his inability to resist when it wanted them. Even his dreams then revolved around his body and what was happening to it. He remembers dreaming of fat stems of black graphite shooting from the center of his chest, around the time the first, extremely fine hairs started to grow, remembers waking up seized by repulsion and fear.
And he remembers that the blossoming of that physicality kept him shut inside like a kind of secret, although it was in fact the surface he presented to the world, so in the end he’d find himself absurdly exposed and unaware whether the world knew everything about him or nothing, because there was no way of discovering whether what was happening to him was a universal experience or absolutely and exclusively his own."

In this novel something occurs that is unseen elsewhere, or is at any rate extremely rare in the history of literature: it seems to have been written by... no one, in a style without style, through craftsmanship, as if the book had materialized on the bookstore shelf like a mushroom.