Book Specs 📖

• Author: David Szalay
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Pages: 349

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Fifteen year old Istvan becomes embroiled in a sexual affair with an older married woman which is the beginning of tumultuous life led by his primal instincts.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Okay. This book was realllllyyy interesting, not only because it requires you dive deeper, but because you underneath all the words the author is saying something ugly and truth about human nature. The rub is that the text is clothed in minimalist language, making it more challenging to decipher (we like an intentional and risky author!!). With main character’s signature phrase being “okay” you can easily imagine the sparseness of dialogue. Yet, I could not put this book down!! The unspeakable, feelings/thoughts that words cannot be captured on paper are what come off the page and require the reader to think outside the text. The juxtaposition of physical violence become sharp, sudden and shocking because most of the novel is borderline mute, moving half in the shadows. The overall mood is unsettling, quiet in a eerie way. Perfectly executed if we’re talking about creating an atmosphere of suspended tension. I’ll have to return to this book again to dissect the intricacies another time!
• Throughout the book, Istvan becomes entwined in several sexual affairs with married women. The odd part is that he does not find them physically attractive but over time as he admits in the book, physical familiarity makes them more attractive. I’m not sure if this somehow is connected to his mother since Istvan’s father is never mentioned in the novel. The relationship with his mother is amicable but he never reaches a level of emotional intimacy that allows him to express how he feels through tragic episodes in his life. The same emotional distance is mirrored in his romantic relationships with women which is captured in a passage below. I haven’t connected yet whether this is a universal animal instinct in men or if this is an exploration of how we are naturally programmed, how our romanticization of monogamous relationships become unnatural.

“He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake. There’s often this feeling of—Yes, I like you, but I like other people as well. It’s not even that I like them more. It’s just that I don’t like them less. So to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing, and that arbitrary feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he’s somehow meant to be with.”

“Quotes”🗣

“And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.”

“There’s something terrible about the way normality asserts itself. About the way that summer insists on happening. About the way the chestnuts blossom and Wimbledon takes place.”

“As long as no one knows about it, it’s like it isn’t really happening.
It’s like it exists in the same way that his fantasies exist, as something he’s just imagining.“

“He realizes that the things that are so important to him—the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—they just aren’t important here. Those things have no reality here. That’s what it feels like. So it makes you feel slightly insane or something, to have those things inside you, when they seem to have no reality here.”