From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
The concept and execution of All That Man Is is absolutely brilliant. It is made up of nine stories, about nine men, each one progressively older and all travelling through Europe. The individual stories are unconnected yet as a whole have the pacing and flow of a well-constructed novel. Dealing with themes of untapped ambition, suppressed emotion, and deep-seated insecurity, it is a book that perfectly captures what it's like to be a man in the early 21st century. Recommended By Shawn D., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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 plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first century man.
Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly 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.
Review
"Szalay’s writing is exact and true and always subtly intelligent; this book is bracing and thrilling and chilling." Tessa Hadley
Review
"A terrific novel—original, piercingly acute and disturbingly, viscerally elegiac." William Boyd
Review
"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Cleverly conceived, authoritative, timely and (in a good way) crushing....There is a cheerful and ghastly sordidness to everything, and Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste." London Review of Books
Review
"An astute and entertaining survey of the state of the modern European male....Existential unease made enjoyable, insightful and all too recognisable." Financial Times, Summer Books 2016
Review
"[David Szalay] is capable of conjuring tenderness from any situation....[Readers] will find a great deal to enjoy in these pages, and further evidence that Szalay...is one of the best fortysomething writers we have." The Guardian (UK)
Review
"Szalay...brings a wide range of skills to bear....A tour-de-force." Financial Times (UK)
About the Author
David Szalay is the author of London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Innocent; and Spring. In 2013 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in Budapest.