India, Nov. 15 -- The novel seems to suggest that the body is both the one thing we truly own, and the one thing that betrays us most. Was that the paradox you wanted to examine - the body as both home and prison? Absolutely, and that's a very nice way of putting it actually. The body defines who we are in some sense, I mean, we are our body. But as you say, it also places limitations on us of various kinds; absolute limitations, really. The word prison might be a bit extreme (laughs) but yes, I think that was a driving idea in the background of the writing process. Definitely. Yes, very much so. The idea of the human as animal is quite prominent in the book. But it is also present with human society. I don't think they're two entirely separate things. I mean, the nature of human society and the way it's built is a reflection of the animal nature of each individual human, to a certain extent. I see those two things as being very closely connected. That connection was also what I was trying to express in the book. I wouldn't say the book is anti- individualistic, but there is a sense that we are all the same person. There wasn't much struggle in terms of making the character and the novel work. That wasn't the case. The sense of writing about a person whose life is shaped by things over which he has no control was an idea that was there from the beginning. I do think all our lives are like that, to quite some extent. So, I wanted to write a book about that. There wasn't a version of the book where Istvan had more agency and then I had to suppress that. It is very important to my conception of the book. The list of things you just said was very exact. It's fully about the socio-economic factors, political events and their effects on the limitations and desires of his own body. The book is about those forces as much as anything else, and how lives are shaped by them. Life isn't solely a matter of individual will and agency. To ignore the larger forces would be to paint a false picture. At the same time, that doesn't mean the book supports the idea that we have no agency. There are quite a few moments in the book that show how free will is actually shaped by those larger forces. Money, status and power serve as more than just backdrops. They actively shape Istvan's trajectory. How do you see the interplay between the physical and capital in this novel? I think the physical animal nature of people and the socio-economic structure of society are very closely connected. They're an expression of each other, in some sense. I don't know if there will be a world where that isn't the case. So, the parts of the book that deal with social status and power and money are in a way a continuation of the earlier parts of the book, where we explore the emotional and sexual power people have over each other. (Laughs) That's a great question. I have to say. Yes!? I mean, I haven't really thought about it like that. Being a writer largely involves sitting silently in a room and doing something which is invisible to an outsider. With this book, I was keen to write a story that was exterior and with characters who were viewed in terms of their actions rather than their thoughts. I always find this very difficult to answer, because there are always so many things, people and works you draw from, consciously and subconsciously. There's a book that is not that well-known, I think, which has had quite a profound impact on this novel. It's Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw. I happened to read it in the early stages of working on Flesh. Apart from that, Michel Houellebecq, the French writer, has been very influential in my work. Virginia Woolf, not a name you'd expect, but she has inspired me as a writer quite a lot as well....