Red Széll

Well, my next book is also written by an author who you interviewed last year, and it's David Solloy's Flesh.

Flesh.

Which I did promise in our last conversation that I would take off my bedside table and read.

And I have to confess, it is the one book of the five that I read over Christmas that I have not finished.

Because quite frankly, I found it pretty hard going.

Why?

Well, for anybody who doesn't know what it's about, it's about a young Hungarian man who moves from rural poverty...

in Hungary and ends up in glitzy, glamorous West London, rubbing shoulders with the rich and semi-famous and, you know, the movers and shakers of good old London town over here in the UK.

And it's about his sense of purposelessness.

Though he ends up becoming a commodity in some ways, hence the word flesh in the title.

his presence becomes a commodity and he is valued, he can see no great value in his own life and doesn't really feel any sense of agency.

And I'm afraid this just bleeds through the writing.

There is a sense of pointlessness to this story, I felt.

I've read David Sollo's work in the past.

He writes well.

But I really... There was just...

No life to the prose that I found and no engagement you could feel with the character.

There's a kind of a moral lassitude about the whole book.

And if I have to sum it up in the two words that just occur so repeatedly that they actually began to make me wince about halfway through the book, it's OK.

LAUGHTER