deborah levy the man who saw everything review

Retrieving the memory of that 1996 exhibit, with its reminder of his worst failure with Jennifer, takes Saul to perhaps his lowest moment. Many of them reveal Saul as a man given to unthinking cruelty and willed blindness, the “man in pieces” exposed in Jennifer’s first solo show. Jennifer is his principal goad over and over, the former lovers state their competing visions of the past in exchanges structured and repeated like the choruses in a song: “It’s like this, Saul Adler” “It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau.” Levy’s formal inventiveness is never mere game-playing it wields emotional weight as virtually every significant detail from Saul’s account of events we thought took place in 1988 proves to have additional meaning or a completely different meaning.

Indeed, the memories that unfold under their prodding don’t show much to be proud of. It’s the first in a chain of strange, unsettling incidents.

Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy’s electrifying The Man Who Saw Everything examines what we see and what we fail to see, the grave crime of carelessness, the weight of history and our ruinous attempts to shrug it off.Jennifer, his father and several other significant hospital visitors do their best to bring Saul back to reality, but “I never much liked it there,” he admits. Deborah Levy, whose new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. And he will befriend a hippy, Rainer, who may or may not be a Stasi agent, but will certainly return to haunt him in middle age. He will fall in love and brood upon his difficult, authoritarian father. There he will encounter – significantly – both his assigned translator and his translator’s sister, who swears she has seen a jaguar prowling the city. Saul leaves to study in communist East Berlin, two months before the Wall comes down.

They have sex then break up, but not before she has photographed Saul crossing the same Abbey Road. He is apparently fine he gets up and goes to see his art student girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. In 1988 Saul Adler (a narcissistic, young historian) is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. ‘The man who had nearly run me over had touched my hair, as if he were touching a statue or something without a heartbeat…’ ‘An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe’ The Times ‘An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel… Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the longlist’ Daily Telegraph

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2019 Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levys electrifying The Man Who Saw Everything examines what we see and what we. One of the most exciting books of the year – this new masterpiece from Deborah Levy is the perfect gift

Deborah levy the man who saw everything review