Never trust my Booker predictions! Yet ‘Flesh’ is a great winner of the 2025 prize.
In my last go at a prediction of the 2025 Booker [see this link], I placed David Szalay’s novel Flesh , 3rd out of the 6th. And now we find it has won. It is more than a worthy winner, and in my blog on it, I rather wordily said so, though I did not read it as Szalay does, this is him quoted by Ella Creamer in The Guardian today, and referring to a piece I read there in the Saturday edition.
Writing in the Guardian over the weekend on his inspiration for Flesh, Szalay said that the novel was “conceived in the shadow of failure” – in autumn 2020 he abandoned a novel he had been working on for nearly four years that he felt wasn’t working. He wanted Flesh to “somehow express the feeling I had that our existence is a physical experience before it is anything else, that all of its other aspects proceed from that physicality”.
My take on it was that it went beyond his expected theme of masculinity to querying whether any human action, including speech (see my blog at this link), really was ultimately reducible to mere semantics. Hence, Szalay’s view that all existence and its products in action, speech and thought (as well as perhaps values) reflect physicality, or embodied flesh, might ultimately be made to rhyme with my reading. But no! No credit is due to me. here. I got it wrong again. The last I managed to predict correctly (proof at the prior link) was Damon Galgut’s supreme novel, The Promise.
A tremendous novel. A masterly prose! But my feelings still go out to Kiran Desai.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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