Skip to main content

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

Website

Martinasblogs

Publications

Facebook

Paris Website

Animal Website

SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES 

 

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).


 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. That

Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

The manuscript, Flaws in the Glass (1981), is Patrick Victor Martindale White’s autobiography. White, born in 1912 in England, migrated to Sydney, Australia, when he was six months old. For three years, at the age of 20, he studied French and German literature at King’s College at the University of Cambridge in England. Throughout his life, he published 12 novels. In 1957 he won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for Voss, published in 1956. In 1961, Riders in the Chariot became a best-seller, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1973, he was the first Australian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Eye of the Storm, despite many critics describing his works as ‘un-Australian’ and himself as ‘Australia’s most unreadable novelist.’ In 1979, The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but he withdrew it from the competition to give younger writers the opportunity to win the award. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass

Sister cities discussed: Canberra and Islamabad

Two months ago, in March 2015, Australia and Pakistan agreed to explore ways to deepen ties. The relationship between Australia and Pakistan has been strong for decades, and the two countries continue to keep dialogues open. The annual bilateral discussions were held in Australia in March to continue engagements on a wide range of matters of mutual interest. The Pakistan delegation discussed points of interest will include sports, agriculture, economic growth, trade, border protection, business, and education. The possible twinning of the cities of Canberra, the capital of Australia, and Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, were also on the agenda (i.e. called twin towns or sister cities). Sister City relationships are twinning arrangements that build friendships as well as government, business, culture, and community linkages. Canberra currently has international Sister City relationships with Beijing in China and Nara in Japan. One example of existing