Jun 19

Jun 19 The Man Who Saw Everything

Author: Deborah Levy
Publisher: Bloomsbury
View on Goodreads

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Cover Description

An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home.

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.

The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present — to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

TL;DR Review

The Man Who Saw Everything is so creative. You’ll spend most of the book feeling lost … but you’re actually supposed to, and it pays off in the end.

For you if: You are willing to be patient and trust the author with a very cerebral reading experience.

Full Review

“What was the rest of it? To live without fear. No, that was impossible. To live with less fear, I whispered to Luna. To live with more hope. To not be hopeless all the time. I didn’t know where all the tears were coming from. Life is shocking.”

The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and it fits right in with that crowd: Cerebral, quite literary, tackling big questions in poetic ways. If you tend to like Booker nominees, you’ll probably like this one, too.

It’s about a young man named Saul Adler, who on the first page of the book is hit by a car while crossing Abbey Road. We follow him afterward and for a few months, as he heads off to East Germany (then the German Democratic Republic on that side of the Berlin Wall). All the while he’s grappling with his history with his father and brother and girlfriend, while in the GDR he’s (trying to) navigate the Stasi state and his interactions with his host family. But there are glimpses of strangeness throughout, and halfway through the book everything sort of flips upside down on its head.

If you read this book, be warned: A degree of trust is involved. You will spend most of it feeling confused and lost. But don’t worry, and don’t be hard on yourself — you are actually supposed to feel this way. The reason why will be slowly peeled back, layer by layer, throughout the second half of the book. It’s really impressive the way Deborah Levy accomplishes this, actually, and even though not everything is 110% crystal clear by the end, she also makes that feel wholly acceptable.

I also appreciated the evolution of our opinion of Saul Adler. In the beginning, you’re fully on his side; you have no reason not to be. But as you read, his shortcomings appear one by one, and by the end you realize that he is a very complicated character who has not always done the right thing by his loved ones.

And that is the lesson at the heart of this book: Our perception of ourselves is very different from the perceptions of others, and those differences shape our relationships. And the more honest we can get with what we are looking at in the mirror, the more we can bring our perception in line with others’ — the more honest we can be with ourselves — the better those relationships can be.