Okay! (the book says this a lot). And “okay”, as we know, says everything and nothing. It can mean boredom, passive-aggression, existential shrugging, or a reluctant burst of energy. It’s gloriously opaque.

What did you say?

Okay?

Okay then.

But I digress.

This is about the book.

And how does one make a book like this?

You take a well-written book — one that doesn’t make you run to Google every two minutes (we don’t use dictionaries anymore) — and then you start cutting. Not with a scalpel (too poetic), but with a pair of scissors. You strip it down to its bones. No skin, no muscle, no sentimental fat. Just structure. And then, like a cosmic joke, you call whatever remains Flesh.

Why this title? Why do titles matter? Why do feelings matter?

This book certainly doesn’t think they do. Or, at any rate, talking about them.

And strangely — it works.

There is so much saying in the not-saying.

So much feeling in the refusal to name the feeling.

Not that a Booker winner needs my defence, but let me still mount one out of old habit: this paring-down doesn’t take anything away. In fact, the silences, the absences, the sharp little pauses — they add more than pages of emotional exposition ever could.

Imagine a therapist who’s had one bad decade too many. After listening to people drone on about their inner lives, she finally snaps, goes rogue, and edits every trace of emotion out of the manuscript. “Enough,” she decides. “Let the facts speak for once.”

And in a lovely twist of fate, this deranged therapist ends up creating a monument to personhood. An iceberg of feeling — vast, submerged, menacing — all built out of absence. The surface of the book is clean, almost still. But beneath it, everything churns. Menacingly.

The reader is kept guessing. It’s a little disorienting at first, especially because the plot moves fast and things keep happening — all the time, everywhere. Yet the writer refuses to tell you how anyone feels. Least of all the enigmatic protagonist.

You begin to wonder if he feels at all.

If he’s a person or an automaton — present in flesh, absent in soul.

Nobody here talks about feelings. Nobody even admits they exist. And yet everything — every gesture, detail, and silence — points toward them, the way circumstantial evidence points to a murder more reliably than an eyewitness ever could.

That’s the genius.

And I loved it. Not because I dislike feelings — quite the opposite. But because I don’t enjoy excessive sweetness that destroys the palate; nor do I enjoy prose that spoon-feeds me emotions until imagination itself becomes redundant.

One reason I read books (and don’t watch as much TV) is precisely to imagine. To paint on the canvas of my mind. To discover how differently a book reads decades apart simply because I have changed.

Sometimes it’s nice to read pages describing that first glance and the flutter it causes. But sometimes, it’s nicer still when a writer trusts the reader enough to let the facts lie there — cool, clean, unadorned — and lets them do whatever they must. Move her. Bore her. Break her. But never manipulate her.

This book doesn’t manipulate.

Its omissions are not laziness but craft.

A strategic silence in a negotiation.

An awkward pause at dinner.

A shadow that makes the body visible.

Draw your own conclusions.

And if I had even a fraction of this writer’s restraint and talent, this review would have been much shorter, especially since I’m writing an ode to saying so little.

But here we are.

Okay then!

Warmly,

B