[So far I have read two of the nine parts of this book. I am reading a couple of parts at a time, writing about these before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
5 May 2026
Parts 1 and 2
Anomie: a state of alienation from mainstream society characterized by feelings of hopelessness, loss of purpose, and isolation.
This isn’t a quotation from the book, but from the OED. It seems to be what the two stories that I’ve read so far entirely consist of. Not that the characters seem to be aware of their alienation. They blame their dissatisfactions on whatever or whoever is around them, because, so far, they haven’t grown up enough to look at the bigger picture. It doesn’t help that they’re in a universe of Szalay’s making, in which there doesn’t seem, really, to be any point in anything. In Part 1, two seventeen-year-old boys mooch around Berlin and Prague for a few days, failing to find anything they are interested in. In Part 2 a 21-year-old finds himself drifting out of a job because his uncle can’t stand his laziness and complete lack of initiative, and into a holiday in which, unaccountably, stuff happens and he lets it.
So who are these losers? Is it fair to call them losers when, if they have any life in them at all, its purpose is to take part in someone else’s thought experiment? That someone, of course, is David Szalay. His experiment, at the age of 42, seems to be to create a series of scenarios in order to conduct some imaginary anthropological research on the way men develop in the 21st Century. OK, I’m guessing, because I’ve only read two of the nine sections so far. But his 17-21-year-olds have a very, very long way to go before they reach anything like adulthood. His main characters, the ones whose points of view he focuses on, seem to be incapable of any meaningfully joined-up thinking. Or forward planning. Or communicating rationally with other people.
What do I mean? In Part 1 we get ‘two young Englishmen … newly arrived from Kraków. They look terrible, these two teenagers, exhausted by the ordeal of the train, and thin and filthy from ten days of Inter Railing.’ They are studying for A levels and hope to go to Oxford. Simon, the one Szalay concentrates on, is studious and shy, looking mainly for what cultural delights Europe has to offer. Not many so far. Ferdinand would probably say that he just wants to have fun, and there hasn’t been much of that either. They might think they know what they want, but they don’t, not really, and clearly assumed it would be fine to set off without any plans. They don’t understand why they aren’t having a good time.
Time for Szalay to throw something new into the mix, sex. Or, at least, the idea of it. Ferdinand identifies a possible target in a girl he thinks of as Sun Hat when he fails to find her later. Simon, meanwhile, seems to be fixated on a girl in England, who seems not really to have acknowledged his existence. Her name is like an earworm for him, or whatever other worm is handy. He never, ever mentions her to Ferdinand. But he has a chance with the wife of the ex-footballer who keeps house where they have a room. She likes the look of Simon, but Ferdinand has to point out ehow she’s all over him in the kitchen. Oh, no, says Simon. (I’m paraphrasing.) No no no–she’s forty! As they prepare to leave on their last day in Prague, Simon realises Ferdinand had taken her up to bed instead.
If it seems like I’m only telling you the bare bones of what happens, that’s because the stories are like that. Plain, unornamented prose, no meaningful inner life reported on. Take Bérnard, the young man from Lille. His story is even more circumstance-driven. And total non-engagement driven. He’s living at home, because it’s cheap, having dropped out of university, a fact that seems more and more believable the longer we know him. (Too long, I’d say, but don’t listen to me.) His uncle, trying to give him a start as a favour to Bérnard’s parents, sacks him because he’s useless. And no, his uncle says, you can’t ask for holiday leave with no notice at all. But Bernard insists, gets sacked, and goes on hisholiday. He’s glad of the month’s pay in lieu of notice, but he’s a bit miffed that the friend who organised it can’t go after all.
He mooches around the third-rate Cyprus resort, thinks about sex in the fifth-rate hotel, and buys contraceptives when the briefest of chats with a nice girl makes him think she’s practically in his bed already. Two fat women, mother and daughter, take him under their wing. The mother, after a day or two, suggests he takes her daughter to bed. He thinks she’s joking, realises she isn’t, and has the best sex ever, all afternoon. Five orgasms, he thinks, and we wonder if he might have been a virgin. I can’t imagine our boy being organised enough not to be. And, oh yeh. Next day the mother, only slightly less mountainously fleshy, gets her turn. They like Cyprus, she tells him.
You see what I mean? It’s seems a strange collection of case studies, in which none of the characters, major or minor, shows the capacity to behave at any level beyond the instinctive. It’s like watching chimpanzees, or something from a Freudian nightmare. There are monsters in Francis Bacon’s paintings with more sense than this.
We can read it for you wholesale 