All That Man Is
David Szalay

Goethe, widely (and mistakenly) credited with coining the phrase “world literature”, or Weltliteratur, remarked that “like all things of supreme value, [art] belongs to the whole world”. I don’t know about the whole world, but David Szalay’s new novel certainly has a stronger claim than most to being a “European novel”.

Despite the title, Szalay makes no claim to offer a representative universal portrait of masculinity, but he deserves credit for giving us a compelling and absorbing glimpse of the contemporary European male experience. All That Man Is consists of nine very loosely related stories set in locations all around Europe – Copenhagan, Zagreb, Prague, London, Budapest, the Cyprus tourist resort of Protaras, various cities across Germany, Geneva – and the nationalities of the protagonists (all men) are as diverse.