FLESH

David Szalay

Vintage.  ISBN and price omitted because you’d have to be desperate to buy this drivel.

This pseudo-novel has won the Booker Prize.

It’s written like this.

Because Szalay can’t write he pretends to be spare.

Hemingway was spare.

This is vacuous.

The page 78 test threw up this timeless sentence: “When they arrive, Norbi tries to remember the code to open the front door of the building.”

Wow !

Forget, “In the town there were two mutes and they were always together” or “It is a truth universally acknowledged..” or “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” or “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K..” or “An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.” Or “Granted: I am the inmate of a mental hospital.”

Some of these idiots use the past tense !

Suppose we re-write Szalay’s sentence with a little attention to economy:

“When they arrive, Norbi tries to remember the door code.”

A saving of seven words.

In one sentence.

What else is lost?

Any meaning?

Any tone?

Any effect?

What use are the words “of the building”?

Is there any suggestion he’s going to open a chicken coop or a prison cell ?

Why “the code to open the front door” instead of “the door code”?

This typing, masquerading as a novel, is full of this lazy, sloppy writing.

Szalay simply takes no care over his sentences.

Why would he when this kind of slovenliness can get you £50,000 and huge sales.

The Booker has nothing to do with literature and all those who have puffed this tosh should never come out in public.

The Booker is about dosh.

People write the puffs because they’re paid.

There is no honesty.

No serious criticism.

And as Kundera pointed out, without that, literature is doomed to swift oblivion.

The swifter the better for this appalling, dumbed-down, dismal stuff.

This is the nadir of stupefaction.

People have lost any sense of the difference between good and bad writing.

A triumph for those who want the masses to be too ignorant to see the difference between good and bad politics.

Much money will be made out of this murder of literature.

That’s what matters.

Fat profits for publishers, fat income for agents, fat advances for spatchcock writers and writing so thin if it were soup it would be nothing but water.

As for the content.

Drugs.

Sex.

Money.

Rags to riches ( what, how original?)

And back to rags (even more so).

Szalay has nothing to say and says it over and over.

This bundle of boredom was written to win the Booker.

It is slavish to the lucre-hungry fools who run publishing.

If the Booker had existed in the 1920s would Joyace have won it?

Would Kafka?

Be honest.

It goes without saying now, anything that wins this shoddy prize is not worth the paper it isn’t written on.

Real creativity requires the discipline of rules, even when the rules are being challenged. The first discipline of literature is in the writing. Flaubert could write. Szalay can’t. He should spend the loot on something that suits him: a games console or the complete works of Jeffrey Archer.

He’s interested in money and cares not a hoot for good writing.

Nor do all the sycophants who grovel at the award ceremony or in the media.

Literature must survive underground where it has been driven by the unprincipled pursuit of money and fame.

Alan Dent.