Az idegen test. David Szalay: Test
The Foreign Body

Summary/Abstract: The essay examines David Szalay’s Flesh as a contemporary rewriting of one of the enduring narratives of world literature: the story of social ascent followed by moral and existential decline. While the novel has frequently been interpreted as a twenty-first-century reworking of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the article argues that its intertextual network is considerably richer. Alongside Thackeray’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, Flesh engages with works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and, more distantly, Franz Kafka’s fiction. Through these literary parallels, the essay analyses the protagonist István's trajectory from social marginality to temporary privilege, emphasizing the recurring motifs of bodily existence, alienation, moral compromise, trauma, and failed self-realization. The discussion also situates Flesh within the broader contexts of postmodern rewriting, transnational literature, and contemporary migration narratives, including the field of Hungarian writing about emigration and identity.

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