As if it was something slightly separate from yourself

He realises 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.

The more I heard about this book, the less interested I was in reading it. But then one day my library hold came in and I couldn't put it down.

Flesh, by David Szalay, is a strangely compelling novel about a man with little agency and almost no interiority. He is not particularly likable, but the novel makes the case that he is deserving of sympathy. István is certainly a victim of circumstance, the consequences of which he never processes. But surely it's on him that he fails to achieve any self-awareness, that he fails to value the potential outcome or even the effort of looking inward. Surely he fails to take meaningful decisions or active responsibility for virtually any aspect of his life. 

As a teenager, István is groomed by an older (married) woman in the apartment complex where he lives with his mother. She kisses him, and days later he remembers it differently, he recalls that they kissed, and when he sees her again he believes that he had kissed her.

He is forever unformed, malleable flesh. His mind, his soul if he has one, is unknown to us. Momentarily I believe he is withholding his opinions, either to preserve himself from the judgment of others or because others aren't worthy of hearing them, but ultimately he seems to hold no opinions whatsoever. It's never clear whether he cares. About anything.

A girl at the bar tells him, "Don't pretend to be a nice person." Not that she has much basis for this reading of his character; maybe it's a default expectation, maybe the men, the boys, who work there typically aren't nice. Maybe she believes that all men pretend. "He said you exemplify a primitive form of masculinity." I wonder, perhaps all men are actually like this.

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 feeling has started to undermine any lingering sense that there might be a particular person that he's somehow meant to be with.

Is this an indictment of men or a formal apology of masculinity? Perhaps István should be viewed as a role model. He allows himself to be buffeted by fate. It is both admirably zen and infuriatingly docile. 

He spends a lot of the evening thinking about it.

And also about his own life at that age, or slightly older.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

About the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them.

At that time even his dreams were about his own physicality, about his physical body and what was happening to it. He remembers dreaming of these black things like fat stalks of graphite erupting from the centre of his chest at about the time that the first fine hairs appeared there, remembers waking up afraid and disgusted.

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.

Perhaps it's at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it.