It was a full house at the Harvard Book Store for an author event Friday. Students, writers, professors and fiction enthusiasts from near and far came to hear from David Szalay, author of “Flesh,” winner of the 2025 Booker Prize.
The evening proceeded as a discussion between Szalay and American novelist Andrew Krivak (author of “Mule Boy”), followed by a question-and-answer period. Krivak opened by saying they would be having a “writer-to-writer conversation,” with the authors trading thoughts about the book and the literary strategies employed to write it.
“Flesh” is a book about “a man at odds with himself,” exploring themes of unresolved trauma and its aftermath through a story about contemporary Europe, localized in the central character of István. The intensity with which the character is drawn is due, in part, to Szalay’s own professional pressures, having abandoned an earlier novel after years of effort and searching for his next subject.
The conversation meandered from the intentionality of the novel’s writing to more philosophical questions about what is knowable and unknowable in the characters in “Flesh,” fiction and life.
Long stretches were dedicated to examining the book’s narrative distance, the balance between interiority and externality, and how the events and environments in “Flesh” shape the reader’s experience of its main character.
The narrative has a spare, detached style and Szalay uses such restraint to create emotional and dramatic impact. The interlocutors also addressed the issue of corporeality as a motivating theme in Szalay’s work. “To live as a body,” remarked the author of “Flesh,” ”is to be considering transience.”
Szalay fielded questions from the audience. People who had listened to the audiobook wanted to know Szalay’s thoughts on it as a form of engaging with fiction. While he confessed that he had not heard the audiobook, he did not look down on listening to books or feel it degraded the experience of reading.
Many were struck by István’s passivity in his own life. Szalay acknowledged this observation about the main character to a certain extent. He spoke about the novel’s exploration of autonomy, agency and how external events can push and pull at individual lives, supplanting the intentionality of an individual’s autonomous decision making.
The evening ended on a lighthearted note, with one audience member saying he heard about the book from Dua Lipa’s book club, and that he was not accustomed to reading “highbrow” literary fiction. Clearly the readership for “Flesh” has broken out beyond the ivy-covered confines of academia and tony publishing houses. To those who think that pop culture is the death of high art, this Harvard Book Store event provided some evidence to the contrary.
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