Esther
2025년 12월 7일
We're reading David Szalay's <Flesh> for our January meeting in 2026.
One of the quiet pleasures of running a book club that is entirely voluntary - no sign-up fees, no solemn vows, just people drifting in and out like birds on a wire - is that you’re gently trained out of expecting very much at all. You stop trying to divine anyone’s “real” intentions in joining, because the truth is most of us don’t have any. And you stop mourning the inevitable fickleness of commitment when the thing in question is so freely given. Best of all, you shed the heavy, civic-minded duty of worrying about accessibility, readability, or any of those worthy public considerations. You can simply lob a book you’re mildly curious about into the group, and if people read it - wonderful; if not - well, you were going to read it anyway.
The next book was chosen in exactly this spirit. I’d been eyeing a handful of this year’s Booker contenders - The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, and The Flashlight by Susan Choi - all sturdy novels in the near-or-over-400-page range, the physical weight of which I can’t quite ignore as a selector. (Though I do warn members that I am slowly but surely evolving into someone who will ignore such things altogether.) Which brought me, in the end, to the actual winner: Flesh by David Szalay. What do I know about it? Not much. I remember hearing someone compare its protagonist to Melville’s Bartleby, the original “I’d prefer not to” minimalist, which was intriguing enough for me to click “order” without further investigation.
If that’s all I know, it does feel rather thin. But it really is the full extent of my knowledge, alongside the fact of its shiny new Booker win. If I’m not even embarrassed about this, well, let me remind you the fault is one we’ve mutually constructed. That said, I do read all the selections and I’m genuinely curious to discover whether the book earns its prize, and whether it earns its place as our first pick of the new year. Not that such things ultimately matter.
As always, I hope you enjoy the book and find something in it compelling enough to bring you along for the conversation. In the meantime, I wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
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Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined. A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself - estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy.
헝가리 한 조용한 아파트 단지에서 어머니와 함께 사는 이슈트반. 막 이사온 그는 친구들이 자연스레 익혀온 사회적 규칙과 분위기에 적응하지 못하고 고립된다. 그러면서 또래들과도, 어머니와도, 결국 자기 자신과도 점점 멀어지게 하는 연속적인 사건으로 끌려 들어간다. 그 후 여러 해 동안 낯선 이들의 선의나 자기의 이익에 실려 흔들리듯 살아가며, 어린 시절 상상할 수 없을 만큼 거리가 먼 삶의 궤적을 그리게 된다. 수십 년에 걸친 개인의 순간들을 엮어낸 <Flesh>는 스스로와 충돌하며 살아가는 한 남자, 통제할 수 없는 환경과 삶의 요구, 그리고 자신에게 주어진 역할들로 인해 소외되고 또 스스로를 소외시키는 인물에 대한 이야기이다. 과거의 그림자와 현대 사회의 무감각함에 드리워, 그를 소외시키는 것들의 긴장이 고조되고 마침내 또 한번의 갑작스러운 비극이 그가 알고 있던 삶을 바꾸는데.
Sunday, January 25, 2026, at 5pm
Join us for an evening of camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. Admission is free, but attendance is restricted to individuals of college age and above. You can sign up for the meeting via Karrot (당근 모임) or secure your spot through Kakao (에스더어학원).
세종에 거주하고 있는 외국인을 포함해 교사, 강사, 회사원, 공무원 및 가사일을 하시는 분들에게도 원서독서를 장려하고 자유롭게 토론할 수 있는 문학적/문화적 소통과 교류의 공간이 되고자 합니다. 해당 책을 읽고, 영어로 소통이 가능한 대학생 이상의 성인에 한해 누구나 무료로 참석할 수 있습니다. 2026년 1월 모임의 책으로는 David Szalay의 <Flesh>를 읽습니다.