Mind the gap

In Piazza Castello, on the opening day of Festivaletteratura 2026, David Szalay discussed his Booker-winning novel Flesh with Italian author Sandro Veronesi. While essentially rooted in physicality, Flesh explores the gap between body and self, the gap through which consciousness creeps, “bringing with it the confusion and suffering integral to being human.”

Istvan, the novel’s protagonist, reveals this gap with a memory from early adolescence, when the discovery of sexuality fills him with surprise, “the consciousness of the child ambushed by demands of the adult body”. A breach opens, precipitating him into adulthood, his innocence lost. The two authors, both similar in age, agreed that over a lifetime this gap gradually closes, worn smooth by the force of habit, only to reopen in later life, as the sense of self refuses to adjust to new limitations of the body.

Veronesi pointed out love and death as two conspicuous absences in the book: “not their consequences, but the acts and moments themselves”. These are the very forces most writers reach for. Szalay admitted he is no exception: the working title of his novel-in-progress is Love and Death. Love is present in Flesh as well: Istvan feels it, even naively declares it, and one of the few abstract discussions in the book is on love. Yet Szalay rarely names it directly, aiming instead to “try and get behind the word”, to reach what lies behind it. It is instinct and raw feeling before any conceptualisation, the body’s logic before the mind’s.

This same essentiality shapes Szalay's dialogue, and with it an apparent paradox: more than half of the book is carried by conversation, yet its protagonist, laconic and evasive as he is, can hardly be called a conversationalist. His reluctance, Szalay explained, is precisely what generates tension even in the most banal exchanges. He became conscious of his debt to English playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter months after Flesh's publication. And, true to form, when Veronesi pushed him to name other influences, he replied with the same reluctance, dissolving the question into the audience’s laughter.