This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is . It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and st

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is . Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life? Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and the

Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “ All That Man Is .” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “ Flesh .” The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us