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A review by coronaurora
All That Man Is by David Szalay
4.0
Szalay, his bombastic title notwithstanding, has crafted here a very elegant and rather elegiac compendium of nine stories, each with a male protagonist in a different decade of life inhabiting the planet now but never quite meeting each other in person, save for two or three instances where an awareness of each other's existence is hinted at. This is striking because in their contemplation of selves and their "place in the world", they are all in the same zipcode. All of them are adrift, physically they are globe-trotting either to quench the wanderlust of youth or spreading their wings in their business ventures or settling uneasily in their foreign retirement villas; but existentially the melancholic beasts they hide within rage away with more power and speed than their escapes: beasts that emerge in a snap, bringing their attention to the "present", to the "texture of existence, the eternal passing of time" as the youngest of boy-men compiles in a piece of verse.
The concentric stories, each an echo of the former but a better articulated moan as we move from the domains of feckless (but curious) young to the lettered (but jaded) adults, are impressive in conjuring images of philosophical and concerned men. The leaden melancholy is mated to the liberating flight of self-awareness, with Szalay's economical, astute prose gliding between memory, conversation, stream-of-consciousness and quick, sticky construction of the physical world of each character. I have to commend him to try and spread his big promise titled fictional thesis on manhood by giving us a collection of protagonists spread across the economic spectrum, and not just intellectual fuddy-duddies crying wimpily in their silos. From eager capitalists to middle-aged sharks to failed prospectors to retired civil servants who've fallen from the corridors of power: as age and life seems to blur and scrape off their "achievements" in the real world, they unsurprisingly question if they have run after the right things. Frustratingly unloved in the way they desire, but powerless to change the surroundings and people they find themselves in, they retreat inwards and find some solace.
Watching Szalay showing pointed snapshots of each of their ways-of-living and behaving: all the unsaid things, the missed cues, the gulfs of perspective with women around them (women, unflatteringly enough, if not foreign and equipped with their own nefarious agendas goading men and boys into confrontation are native, unsatisfied and have moved on from our protagonists): brings out the tragicomic note in these stories chronicling contemporary manhood in crisis. I liked Szalay's confidence in keeping tons of detail off the page and yet managing to evoke people, place and age so adroitly, tale after tale.
Given the contemplative nature of the work which is mostly about the tone and the mood, I recommend it with caution, and for those patient enough to embark upon these stories connected by their shared meditation on manhood, to be prepared to adjust their biorhythms.
The concentric stories, each an echo of the former but a better articulated moan as we move from the domains of feckless (but curious) young to the lettered (but jaded) adults, are impressive in conjuring images of philosophical and concerned men. The leaden melancholy is mated to the liberating flight of self-awareness, with Szalay's economical, astute prose gliding between memory, conversation, stream-of-consciousness and quick, sticky construction of the physical world of each character. I have to commend him to try and spread his big promise titled fictional thesis on manhood by giving us a collection of protagonists spread across the economic spectrum, and not just intellectual fuddy-duddies crying wimpily in their silos. From eager capitalists to middle-aged sharks to failed prospectors to retired civil servants who've fallen from the corridors of power: as age and life seems to blur and scrape off their "achievements" in the real world, they unsurprisingly question if they have run after the right things. Frustratingly unloved in the way they desire, but powerless to change the surroundings and people they find themselves in, they retreat inwards and find some solace.
Watching Szalay showing pointed snapshots of each of their ways-of-living and behaving: all the unsaid things, the missed cues, the gulfs of perspective with women around them (women, unflatteringly enough, if not foreign and equipped with their own nefarious agendas goading men and boys into confrontation are native, unsatisfied and have moved on from our protagonists): brings out the tragicomic note in these stories chronicling contemporary manhood in crisis. I liked Szalay's confidence in keeping tons of detail off the page and yet managing to evoke people, place and age so adroitly, tale after tale.
Given the contemplative nature of the work which is mostly about the tone and the mood, I recommend it with caution, and for those patient enough to embark upon these stories connected by their shared meditation on manhood, to be prepared to adjust their biorhythms.