Flesh, Szalay D., 2025

Instead of taking pictures on trips with the family, I've started taking short videos, maybe ten to fifteen seconds long that I stitch together into a long twenty-something minute video. Szalay seems to do the same over the course of Istvan's lifetime in Flesh, giving a sort of voyeuristic feel to the novel, where every vignette, affair, misdeed seems impersonal and feeling-less. You get the sense that Istvan is no more an active agent in the events that befall him than is the reader, both merely witnesses to his life's happenings. After an affair with a fourty-something year old woman as a teenager and his causing the death of her husband, neither of which he asked for or wished, his life unfurls from scene to scene, all of which seem the result of forces entirely apart from him, until, finally, he's alone.