Yet the actual unfolding of these events feels less significant than our fleeting immersion in the consciousness experiencing each of them. There are seductions and betrayals, secrets spilled and punches thrown, names disgraced and fortunes lost there’s even a regaining-consciousness-in-a-hospital scene - all the sorts of events that might take place were they given a whole lifetime to unfold. Szalay charts modern man’s progress through the seasons of life in brief glimpses at nine richly flawed individuals, crafting moments that seem both intimate and archetypal. In fact, the Budapest-based British author manages much more, and with far greater feeling than such a taxonomical approach might threaten. That David Szalay’s latest novel, which was shortlisted this year for the Booker Prize, manages to pull off even half of what it sets before the reader in a schema like this is remarkable. A book about youth and ambition and migration and aging and death and masculinity and time and the search for meaning in a post-meaning world, all themes reaching together toward some kind of universality by way of a measured schematic progression. IT’S A CLASSICALLY - even self-consciously - modernist setup for a book: nine sections, proceeding sequentially from April to December nine protagonists, advancing in age from 17 to 73 all European men traveling within Europe.

All that man is by david szalay