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
- Booker Prize 2025, winner
Where the story of Flesh takes place
- Budapest and beyond, the 1990s to the present (1995 to 2025), the main setting