Hungary, a former Communist country in Eastern Europe, can be particularly proud of this year’s Nobel Prize and the Booker. While László Karsznahorkai, this year’s winner for the Nobel Prize in literature, is a writer from Hungary, David Szalay, the 2025 Booker Prize winner, is a Canadian-Hungarian writer. Szalay’s father emigrated from Hungary. Apart from that, there is nothing in common between them. Both writers belong to two generations and their narrative styles are also completely different. Karsznahorkai is a postmodernist writer whose experimental narrative style of writing has a modernist lineage. Szalay demonstrates the nature of realist writing in his writing. Karsznahorkai’s style is complicated, while Szalay’s is a simple narrative style. The chemistry of storytelling is different in both of their writings. While Karsznahorkai’s writing confronts the experimentalism of modernity with its dense structure resembling that of mythology and folk narratives, Szalay’s follows the style of western realist representation.

The story of Flesh, Szalay’s Booker winner, is told in a linear mode with no quirks and turns. It follows the old realist pattern of beginning, middle and end. Like 19th century realist novels, thematically, it represents the social mores of its age, which is the late 20th century and early 21st........

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