David Szalay is a quiet man, seemingly comfortable with solitude and silence, whose existence has been somewhat unsettled by winning the Booker Prize. As El País reports in its interview with the writer, Szalay, born in Montreal in 1974, now lives in Vienna with his wife and their two-year-old son, far from the brightest glare of literary celebrity.
His Booker-winning novel, La carne, published by Feltrinelli in a translation by Ce Santiago, follows several decades in the life of István, an apparently ordinary Hungarian man. Yet the novel’s sweep makes clear that no life is entirely ordinary. Its story moves through the fall of communism, the Iraq war, Hungary’s entry into the European Union, Brexit-era London and the upheaval of the pandemic. The historical events are not merely scenery. They press against the body and choices of the protagonist, shaping a life over which he often appears to have less control than he might imagine.
Szalay’s own biography is similarly marked by movement across European borders. He was born to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, grew up in England, and has also lived in Lebanon and Brussels. He previously lived in Budapest, but says the political situation in Hungary was one factor in the family’s decision to leave, although not the only one. After the legislative elections in April, he and his family considered returning. For now, they have decided against it.
Vienna, he says, is a comfortable place to live. His wife is German, making the Austrian capital, in a sense, partly home. Yet Szalay’s relationship with belonging remains complicated. “There is no place where I feel at home in an absolute and simple way,” he says. He has, however, become accustomed to that condition.
The quietness of his surroundings appears to correspond with his literary temperament. His Vienna flat is spacious and austere, with white walls, high ceilings and few objects. He likes to work at six in the morning, before the rest of the household wakes. He knows a writing session has gone well when he discovers that his coffee has been cooling for an hour without being touched.
For much of his career, Szalay was what some call a “writer’s writer”. Granta selected him among Britain’s best young novelists, and in 2016 he was a finalist for the Booker with All That a Man Is. La carne, however, has changed the scale of his literary life. The novel has been translated into 40 languages, bringing international attention that has also made it more difficult for him to find time to write the next book.
The success, he says, is beginning to become frustrating, although he expects he will miss it when it ends. He does not take the attention for granted because he knows what it means to be a writer who is not especially successful. Age has also altered his sense of time. Since his thirties, mortality and the passing of time have ceased to be abstract concepts and become something “visceral”.
That awareness runs through La carne, particularly in its treatment of masculinity.
The novel can be read as an examination of what remains of masculinity when the model inherited from fathers and grandfathers no longer provides reliable instructions. Money, physical strength, sex, professional success, fatherhood and the ability to protect and provide still organise István’s existence, but they no longer guarantee satisfaction.
Szalay says he wanted to write about “what it means to have a male body in the world”, although he resists the suggestion that masculinity is the novel’s entire subject. “I never said it wasn’t about masculinity. Obviously it is, and to say otherwise would be a lie. But there are other things…”
István initially appears to embody an older model of masculine identity. He is a soldier and bodyguard, and his work can involve physical violence. He does not express himself easily or articulately. Yet Szalay deliberately avoids reducing him to a stereotype. His character is complicated not because the author wanted to dismantle a stereotype, but because he wanted the character to feel real.
There is another important weakness beneath the apparent strength: István does not seem to possess a strong sense of agency. He reacts rather than decides. Events happen to him and he adapts, often without appearing certain about what he wants or whom he wants.
This is where Szalay’s treatment of masculinity becomes less a defence of traditional male identity than an examination of its vulnerabilities. He rejects the idea that he should become a writer defined by the subject. “I don’t want to be the guy who writes about masculinity. It’s not a label I want to carry,” he says.
His next novel, he promises, will incorporate a stronger female perspective.
István’s emotional restraint is central to the novel’s style. His favourite word is “okay”, a verbal device capable of expressing consent, indifference, resignation or confusion. It appears around three hundred times in the book. Szalay says he did not notice the accumulation while writing and only became aware of it after readers pointed it out.
The apparently ordinary conversations in La carne often conceal their emotional weight beneath the surface. Szalay says the restrained style was deliberate. A narrative voice that refuses to tell readers how to feel can make disturbing events more powerful. Something unsettling can happen without the narrator announcing that it is unsettling.
The effect changes when István becomes a father. His emotional reserve begins to loosen, and the prose allows more description and feeling. The distinction between the writer discussing emotional restraint and the domestic world around him becomes almost tangible when Szalay’s wife and son enter the room during the interview.
Sex provides another route into the novel’s exploration of vulnerability. From its opening pages, István has already learned to regard himself as sexually inadequate. A friend’s claim that he masturbates four or five times a day creates an early comparison, while a relationship with an older married neighbour deepens his sense of inadequacy.
Szalay is interested in the unstable boundary between repulsion and desire. What appears strange or disgusting can become sexually obsessive. With Helen, his future wife, attraction emerges differently, challenging idealised assumptions about how desire is supposed to work.
The sexual descriptions in La carne are deliberately resistant to conventional eroticism. They include saliva, colliding teeth, numb arms and attention wandering towards a jar of fermented pickles. For Szalay, this reflects the difficulty of representing an experience that is fundamentally non-verbal.
“Sex is essentially non-verbal, and violence is similar to it,” he says. “That’s why it is so difficult to write about them.”
That connection between sex and violence also helps explain the novel’s treatment of male vulnerability. Szalay rejects readings of writers such as Hemingway and John Updike as straightforward defenders of masculine values. Their work, he argues, is instead concerned with male vulnerability, weakness, anxiety and vanity.
István does not become a conventional hero. At most, he becomes a tragic one. Szalay does not regard him as simply a loser either. Without revealing the ending, he says that István eventually reaches something beyond the conventional criteria by which masculine success is judged. His life has been damaged by destiny, chance, time and his own body, but he retains “a kind of moral dignity”.
The novel’s structure reinforces that ambiguity. La carne employs material associated with the traditional nineteenth-century novel — war, death, accidents and sudden changes of fortune — but presents it through a strikingly contemporary narrative restraint. Major events often occur between chapters or outside the page.
Szalay says he wanted a book in which dramatic things happen and the plot remains strong, while deliberately keeping many major events offstage. He values the tension between old-fashioned narrative machinery and modern stylistic restraint.
That concern leads to a broader question about the future of fiction. Responding to a Financial Times discussion about possible self-censorship among male novelists, Szalay argues that the greatest danger of self-censorship is that it can make writing boring. Avoiding uncomfortable characters and situations, he suggests, can diminish fiction.
“The future of the novel depends on not being boring,” he says. “It was always important, but now, with the immense competition for our attention from other media, being boring can be fatal.”
History, meanwhile, enters La carne through the body of its protagonist. István’s life moves from communism to the pandemic, with political and social forces repeatedly intervening in circumstances he cannot control.
Szalay does not call the book a historical novel, but wanted it to be embedded in history. Individual lives unfold alongside political events, while forces much larger than individuals constrain their ability to act.
His own experience of moving between Britain and Hungary informs this understanding of Europe. As a child, he travelled between London and communist Hungary, encountering a place that was simultaneously foreign and familiar. He describes Central and Eastern Europe’s experience in terms of centuries of invasions, occupations and belonging to other empires, followed by communism. That history, he argues, helps explain why national identity, Christianity and nationalism occupy different positions there from those they hold in Western Europe.
The irony is that a novel centred on contemporary masculinity was awarded the Booker by a jury that included Sarah Jessica Parker. Szalay admits he was not, and is not, a fan of Sex and the City, although his mother and sister are. He promises to watch it.
The encounter also points towards the direction of his next novel. It will have a stronger female perspective and offer more direct access to the consciousness of a woman. Szalay rejects the idea that this represents a direct response to the debate surrounding La carne. His explanation is simpler: repeating the same thing would be boring.
“What has brought me this far is always doing something different from what is expected,” he says.
For a writer newly propelled from literary recognition into global prominence, that may be the most revealing principle of all. La carne examines a man shaped by forces he cannot fully control, a Europe fractured by history and a masculinity whose inherited certainties have weakened. Yet Szalay’s own answer to literary expectation is not to defend a fixed identity, but to keep moving beyond it.
