Männer

David Szalay: All That Man Is

Made the Man Booker shortlist this year. A good read. Szalay presents short stories that revolve around men at different stages of their lives:

• Two young Brits travelling through Europe on interrail. While in Prague, one of them ends spending the night with the married owner of the apartment they are staying at.
• A young unemployed Frenchman on holidays in Cyprus where he meets meets a massively obese British mother and daughter couple.
• A Hungarian former soldier who falls in love with the prostitute he protects in London.
• A Belgian professor on a road trip through Germany. His young girlfriend has just discovered she is pregnant.
• A Danish journalist who visits his country's minister of defense on holidays in Spain to confront the latter about an affair he has had.
• A married British real estate developer who, while on a business trip to Switzerland, is being hit on by a younger colleague of his.
• A British pensioner who has emigrated to Croatia and whose life is thrown off balance when his only friend in town begins an affair with a younger woman.
• A Russian oligarch who is at the brink of financial ruin and whose wife is divorcing him. The oligarch heads for his yacht in the Aegean sea to commit suicide.
• A British retired civil servant at his holiday home in Italy who is looking back at his life while recovering from heart surgery and an accident .

Overall, definitely nice to read. Szalay's realism and attention to detail in describing the various scenarios is captivating. It is also fascinating to follow the nine men at different stages of their lives. Moreover, Szalay has written a truly European novel, whose settings span the entire continent. Still, while the short stories are really great, the book as whole didn't entirely click with me. One of the reasons may be that it remains unclear whether the book works as a novel or is better read as a loose collection of short stories.

Random movie association:

Still working on that one. But if the book needed a soundtrack, Grönemeyer would have provided it.

Favorite quotes:

"As he had been intent on enacting his own long-standing fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less elfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness- not having learned yet, how easily and lastingly people are hurt- and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now."

"That's the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it's too late to do anything about it. That's why it is your fate- it's too late to do anything about it."

'Tell me ... have you got a hobby?' 'A hobby? ... No' He has never had a hobby- in his Who's Who entry, he had listed 'interests' as 'wealth' and 'power'.

"Slowly they made their peace with the place, until they felt a kind of love for it. You learn to love what's there, not what's not there. How can you live, otherwise?"

"Amemus eterna et non peritura. Amemus- Let us love. Eterna- that which is eternal. Et non peritura- and not that which is transient."