★ 08/19/2019
Booker Prize–finalist Levy (Hot Milk) explores the fragile connections and often vast chasms between self and others in this playful, destabilizing, and consistently surprising novel. The book’s first half, set in late 1988, unfolds fairly straightforwardly as young historian Saul Adler, living in London, prepares to travel to communist East Berlin to conduct academic research in exchange for writing a complimentary piece about East Germany’s economic miracle. He asks his girlfriend, a talented photographer, to take his photo in the famed Abbey Road crosswalk, as a gift for the Beatles-obsessed sister of his German translator. But as he crosses the road, he is hit by a car—and in many ways, his trip, and perhaps his entire life, changes course. In Germany, Saul both falls in love with and later betrays his translator, Walter, even as he suspects Walter is implicated in the East German surveillance machine. Jump forward to 2016, and another car accident in the same crosswalk upends everything the reader (not to mention Saul himself) has come to expect up to that point. The novel’s first half may read like a fairly conventional portrait of a narcissistic young man intent on sabotaging his romantic relationships, but the second half is both impressionistic and profound, interrogating divisions between East and West, past and present, fact and fiction, and even life and death. The greatest divide Levy plumbs, however, is the one between the self and other, as Saul reluctantly acknowledges both his culpability in his own life’s tragedies and his insignificance in others’ narratives. Levy’s novel brilliantly explores the parallels between personal and political history, and prompts questions about how one sees oneself—and what others see. (Oct.)
"Deborah Levy’s prose is light-handed and leaves a pleasant sting … in the new novel, Levy looks at masculinity through the point of view of Saul, a proud defector who sneers at ‘authoritarian old men’ like his father and the regimes they create, their dependence on walls, imaginative and real." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"Levy, as evidenced in Hot Milk (2016) and Swimming Home (2011), is a master of the seemingly loose yet actually taut story... As in her previous books, Levy’s prose in The Man Who Saw Everything is controlled, refractive, sharply intelligent. There’s no wasted motion. Single sentences render character with the clarity, and cruelty, of a snapshot...Love is unsettling, Levy suggests, and so is time, and so is sexuality, and so is the self. The Man Who Saw Everything, in its ghostly play of personal and political histories, bears witness to this truth." - The Boston Globe
"In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both. If the themes sound weighty, Levy’s elliptical fiction is the opposite, thanks in part to her wry appreciation of dramatic ironies at work. Her restless protagonists travel the Continent trying to forge an identity, only to discover that history has a way of laying traps for us—and also offering escapes when we least anticipate them. The Man Who Saw Everything, Levy’s most stylistically complex novel yet. ... Levy’s boldness, and her voice, are hard earned. ... Levy doesn’t whisper in her fiction, but in her slim, elliptical books, she unspools big odysseys." - The Atlantic
"Elliptical, elusive and endlessly stimulating… The Man Who Saw Everything is a brilliantly constructed jigsaw puzzle of meaning that will leave readers wondering how much they can ever truly know." - The Washington Post
"Deborah Levy’s novels are small masterworks of inlay, meticulously constructed. And The Man Who Saw Everything is perhaps her cleverest. But cleverness for its own sake is clearly not what interests her. Being human does. That is mystery enough, she repeatedly proves, as she tantalizes us with connections and secrets that seem to hover at the edge of our vision. Few writers, for example, can summon sadness with such force…Big ideas thud onto the page, like apples hitting the roof of that garden shed, but we hardly hear them. Deborah Levy makes us listen instead for the fragile rhythm of a breaking heart." - Wall Street Journal
"Haunting and effective…Irresistible." - Associated Press
"A work of philosophy and art... Each novel Man Booker finalist Deborah Levy writes comes nearer perfection." - New York Journal of Books
"Deborah Levy, one of the most intellectually exciting writers in Britain today, has produced in this perplexing work a caustically funny exploration of history, perception, the nature of political tyranny and how lovers can simultaneously charm and erase each other." - New York Times Book Review
"Levy's writing is playful, smart, and full of memorable lines." - NPR.org
"Levy’s deceivingly slim books are crammed with allusions to her literary progenitors: Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, but also Louise Bourgeois, Claude Chaun, and Cindy Sherman. For Levy is, above all, a visual writer, heaping image upon tantalizing image… Her novels are meticulously structured. They circle in on themselves, full of repetitions, allusions, and elisions whose logic unfailingly reveals itself at the end. With Levy, you are never quite sure of your footing. But she is… he experience of reading her is much like the jolt and pleasure of being submerged in water—resurfacing to find that the weather has turned." - The New York Review of Books
"Longtime readers of Levy’s work will know that she’s just as capable of voyaging into the surreal and uncanny as she is documenting the social and psychological mores of her characters… you have a sense of a writer who’s capable of nearly anything… a writer whose work has crossed boundaries of format and genre." - Longreads
"Reading Deborah Levy’s novels is a lesson in humility. She is a careful and intelligent writer with an absolute command of language, one who demands you not only to pay close attention, but also second-guess your immediate reactions and responses to her work. Her novels are deceptively slim in length, but supersized with profound ideas that defy preconceived notions and easy interpretations. The Man Who Saw Everything is just such a book, and reading it is the best possible sort of challenge" - Newsday
"A superbly crafted, enigmatic new story from an author of note…In a relatively short book, Levy spins an extraordinary web of connection, a dreamscape in which plangent images like a pearl necklace, a spilled drink, or the petals of a tree recur like soft chimes…Head-spinning and playful yet translucent, Levy's writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry. Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel." - Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews
"Booker Prize–finalist Levy (Hot Milk) explores the fragile connections and often vast chasms between self and others in this playful, destabilizing, and consistently surprising novel… Levy’s novel brilliantly explores the parallels between personal and political history, and prompts questions about how one sees oneself—and what others see." - Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
"The Man Who Saw Everything is bifurcated into two time periods: 1988 and 2016, but by Deborah Levy's deft hand and brilliant command of metaphor, the boundaries of space and time collapse. This is an extraordinary novel that captures the zeitgeist and specters of 20th-century Communism in such a way that far exceeds the 200 pages it is bound in." - Shelf Awareness
"Audacious… compelling … the book [has] an understated power, as we confront a writer working against expectation to subvert the conventions of the novel, to rethink the form on her own terms." - New Republic
"An evocative journey across a shape-shifting personal and political landscape. As Levy peels back each new layer of this at-times enigmatic story, there are new pleasures disclosed at every turn." - Bookpage
"There is no way to succinctly summarize this slim book and adequately convey how it manages to hold exquisitely actual multiverses within its pages… A brilliant, blistering, bold look at identity, relationships, and time; a perfect puzzle of a novel." - Nylon
"[An] utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel, which revisits aspects of Europe’s authoritarian 20th-century history through the delirium of one man’s shattered mind… Nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, The Man Who Saw Everything is an intricate jigsaw, full of pieces that tantalizingly never quite fit together. . . In writing that is as clear as a stream yet also full of withheld meaning, Levy suggests that the grief and guilt inside Saul . . . is connected to Europe’s legacy of persecution, paranoia, and totalitarianism." - Daily Telegraph
"Deborah Levy’s intelligent and supple latest novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, recently longlisted for the Booker Prize… is stunningly disorienting, fascinating . . . the balance shifts through Levy’s skillful, dizzying storytelling." - The Financial Times
★ 2019-07-28
Multiple versions of history collide—literally—in a superbly crafted, enigmatic new story from an author of note.
"I've mixed now and then all up," says Saul Adler, the central figure in Levy's (The Cost of Living, 2018, etc.) tantalizing new novel, which interconnects place, subject, and time as intricately as lace-making. As the book opens, Saul is crossing Abbey Road in London in 1988, mimicking John Lennon on the cover of the Beatles' eponymous album, for the sake of a photograph being taken by his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. But Saul is knocked down by a car and lightly injured. Later, that same event is presented again with a different outcome, the repetition sandwiching the space in which Jennifer rejects Saul's proposal of marriage and ends their relationship, and he travels to East Berlin on a research trip. There, he falls in love with translator Walter Müller and also, separately, becomes sexually involved with Müller's sister. These, however, are merely the broad brush strokes of a story layered with detail and import, spanning many themes, from sexual identity to fatherhood, memory to mortality. In a relatively short book, Levy spins an extraordinary web of connection, a dreamscape in which plangent images like a pearl necklace, a spilled drink, or the petals of a tree recur like soft chimes. What is past, what is to come, and what is real are all for the reader to discover alongside the character of Saul himself, "a man in pieces." At times he's a young figure of freakish beauty, at others, older and disappointing, someone who wounds or treats cruelly those whom he loves. Head-spinning and playful yet translucent, Levy's writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry.
Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel.
