“A beautifully disjointed novel that communicates knowledge truer than fact, with a careless, flawed protagonist (often vain, often marred by his own intellect) who survives beyond corporeal form or linear time. I was gobsmacked by Levy’s brilliance and all the dark movement beneath her prose. The Man Who Saw Everything is somehow before our time and after; of the political moment and reaching in all directions.”
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date 2019-09-03
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Spencer R.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781632869845
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
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.
