David Szalay. (2016). All That Man Is: A Novel. Graywolf Press.

David Szalay. 2016. All That Man Is: A Novel. Graywolf Press.

David Szalay, All That Man Is: A Novel. Graywolf Press, 2016.

David Szalay. All That Man Is: A Novel. Graywolf Press, 2016.

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   • bioText: David Szalay was born in Canada in 1974. His first novel, London and the South-East, won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His second novel, The Innocent, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. He lives in London.
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All That Man Is

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Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction
A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism

Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving—in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel—to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man.
Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts—a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.

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     Starred review from July 18, 2016
     Szalay (London and the South-East) delivers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of nine men at various stages in their lives, each in the throes of extraordinary change. Despite their diverse circumstances, they are all somehow connected, engaged in a search for relevance and—dare they even consider it—meaning. English teenagers Simon and Ferdinand arrive in Berlin with competing ideas of how best to enjoy their time abroad; Bérnard, working halfheartedly in his uncle’s window shop outside Lille, France, experiences a life-altering holiday at a Cyprus beach resort; Kristian, a successful Danish tabloid editor, brings down the country’s defense minister after an indiscretion; Aleksandr, a disgraced Russian oligarch, contemplates suicide; an aging diplomat considers his mortality while recuperating from a heart operation in an Italian villa and notes, in what could be the book’s tagline, “How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window.” Without exception, the stories—subtle, seductive, poignant, humorous—bear witness to the alienation, self-doubt, and fragmentation of contemporary life; each succeeds on its own while complementing the others. Szalay’s riveting prose and his consummate command of structure illuminate the individual while exploring society’s unsettling complexity. In 2013, Szalay was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. This effort exceeds even that lofty expectation.

2. • premium: True
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     The third book from Szalay, one of Granta's most recent group of Best Young British Novelists, is a tightly woven, precisely observed novel in stories, nine of them, about men adrift, lonely, wandering, and wondering.The book's conceit is imaginative, its architecture impressive. The men depicted range in age from 17 (a callow, awkward university student on a budget trip through Europe with his more outgoing and lusty friend) to 73 (a retired government minister on a winter trip to his damp, mouse-infested cottage in Italy, where he's retreated not so much to lick his wounds as to catalog his infirmities as old age settles in). In between we meet a drifting young French tourist in search of sex and adventure who finds them in an unexpected form, or rather forms; a hypocritical Danish tabloid journalist chasing a scandal; a middle-aged English blowhard and expat in Croatia whose life is in epic collapse; and a Russian oligarch whose empires of metallurgy, marriage, and self-created mythology are crumbling. These men and the others (a selfish academic medievalist whose girlfriend is pregnant, a Hungarian bodyguard who's fallen in love with the jet-setting prostitute he's protecting, and a seller of high-end real estate who's chafing at his sense of being settled) resemble one another in several ways. All are sex- and/or power-obsessed, all away from home, all solitary, all in the grips of overwhelming inertia and of the philosophic realization, in some cases explicit and in some tacit, that "Life is not a joke." One may wish their circumstances were less cramped and airless, their ideas of manhood more capacious (and that women played a fuller role in their lives), but Szalay writes with subtlety and pathos about these flawed and floundering figures, none quite able to feel like the protagonist of his own life story.A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 15, 2016
     

     This collection of interconnected short stories all feature men and are linked together by a theme, aging. It begins with two teenage boys backpacking across Europe before heading to university and ends with a reluctantly introspective 73-year-old man recuperating from a car accident in Italy. Each piece focuses on a different man in a particular stage of life. They are single, married, and divorced; students, slackers, strivers, career-focused professionals, the reluctantly unemployed, and retired. Szalay (Spring; The Innocent) does an excellent job of creating distinct and fleshed-out male protagonists and evoking various European cities in an easy and engaging style even when addressing difficult subjects. VERDICT Warning: this collection privileges believability over likability, so those who want lovable characters may be disappointed. This would be a good choice for book clubs as readers won't find well-developed female characters and can discuss the lack of female representation.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2016
     The third book from Szalay, one of Granta's most recent group of Best Young British Novelists, is a tightly woven, precisely observed novel in stories, nine of them, about men adrift, lonely, wandering, and wondering.The book's conceit is imaginative, its architecture impressive. The men depicted range in age from 17 (a callow, awkward university student on a budget trip through Europe with his more outgoing and lusty friend) to 73 (a retired government minister on a winter trip to his damp, mouse-infested cottage in Italy, where he's retreated not so much to lick his wounds as to catalog his infirmities as old age settles in). In between we meet a drifting young French tourist in search of sex and adventure who finds them in an unexpected form, or rather forms; a hypocritical Danish tabloid journalist chasing a scandal; a middle-aged English blowhard and expat in Croatia whose life is in epic collapse; and a Russian oligarch whose empires of metallurgy, marriage, and self-created mythology are crumbling. These men and the others (a selfish academic medievalist whose girlfriend is pregnant, a Hungarian bodyguard who's fallen in love with the jet-setting prostitute he's protecting, and a seller of high-end real estate who's chafing at his sense of being settled) resemble one another in several ways. All are sex- and/or power-obsessed, all away from home, all solitary, all in the grips of overwhelming inertia and of the philosophic realization, in some cases explicit and in some tacit, that "Life is not a joke." One may wish their circumstances were less cramped and airless, their ideas of manhood more capacious (and that women played a fuller role in their lives), but Szalay writes with subtlety and pathos about these flawed and floundering figures, none quite able to feel like the protagonist of his own life story.A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction
A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism

Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving—in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel—to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark...

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