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The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy: book review



 

The Man Who Saw Everything (2019) is set in London and East Berlin from 1988 to 2016. 

 

The novel begins in London in September 1988. Twenty-eight-year-old history researcher Saul Adler is about to have a photograph of him crossing Abbey Road, partially recreating the iconic photograph of the Beatles’ last album Abbey Road in which the four singers—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—are crossing the street in August 1969. Adler’s 23-year-old girlfriend Jennifer Moreau is an art student who is going to take the photo of Adler crossing the road.

 

Before the photo shoot, Adler is hit by a car, causing a hip injury. This changes his whole life. 

 

For his history research, Adler travels to communist East Berlin—the German Democratic Republic—where he stays with his translator’s sister Luna. This is a year before the fall of the Berlin wall. Luna wants to escape, to be free, to live in England. 

 

Time goes back and forth, from 1988 to the 1940s, to 1989 to 2016, the day before Britain votes to leave the European Union, when Saul is 56 years old and Jennifer is now 51. In 2016, Saul and Jennifer are again recreating the Abbey Road crossing. But time is fluid and ‘there is a spectre inside every photograph.’ And history repeats.

 

Friendships between Saul, Jennifer, Luna, and Luna’s brother Walter, become entangled and complicated, blurred by real and imagined betrayals, and real and imagined time lapses. 

 

Everything becomes blurred, from Saul’s perception of reality to the concept of narrative story-telling, making this a strange, fragmented, repetitive, foggy story to read. Deciphering locations, times, and purposes leads to more mystery and bewilderment for the reader. 

 

I liked the beginning and the end, got lost somewhere in the middle, re-read a few pages, got back on track, then tried to work out why parts of this book were great and other parts were like a fourth-rate science fiction novel. I think this is because I didn’t really like any of the characters and therefore I didn’t really want to know what they were doing, or doing next. Saul is flawed, but I am not wholly sympathetic. He also seems to be able to see the future, and that’s when I realised that I was not reading what I thought I was reading. 

 

This must be one of those books that has to be re-read multiple times to work out the threads of the Beatles lyrics, the communist decoding sequences, the spectre imagery, mother-father issues, the masculinity-femininity threads, photography and the image, and the time-and-space references. And I’m not in a hurry to read it again.






 


 

 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


 

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