A hesitation is not the same as a pause. He is her muse, in the sort of upending of gender expectations that Levy likes to explore. What do we do with the things we do not want to know?”“Knowledge we cannot bear to live with” is central to Levy’s latest novel, “The Man Who Saw Everything” — her third consecutive novel to contend for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize.The book is constructed like a cat’s cradle, a chronological double helix. The Man Who Saw Everything. Add to Cart. “By November 1989” — that is, in 14 months — “the borders will be open and within a year your two Germanys will be one.”Perhaps you just needed to repeat history, Walter suggests.Part 2: It’s 2016, and 56-year-old Saul has just been hit by the same Jaguar crossing Abbey Road. In a novel that unfolds like an experimental film, with flashbacks and flash-forwards, it gradually becomes clear how deeply entwined those interests are with Adler’s personal relationships—and how much more fraught those relationships are than he recognizes.Levy is intrigued by the ways in which history and family history can echo each other. You are my boyfriend,” she informs him.) Qty. The price is that the other characters in Levy’s novel remain figures from a Greek chorus whose chief function is to remind Saul, in vain, not to forget the canned pineapple or to look both ways before he crosses the street.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.“The Man Who Saw Everything” concludes with a vision of Saul once again crossing Abbey Road, this time with his loved ones gathered to see if he’ll make it. I love you. SKU. Deborah: —chimes through every page.
Levy doesn’t whisper in her fiction, but in her slim, elliptical books, she unspools big odysseys.We want to hear what you think about this article. The contents of Saul’s sling bag are scattered across the asphalt — his lecture notes on Stalin’s method of seducing women; the packet of condoms he’s bringing to a rendezvous with his art-photographer girlfriend, Jennifer — along with a small rectangular object belonging to the car’s driver, an elegant silver-haired gentleman who introduces himself as Wolfgang. Born in 1959, she grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. Their paths diverge, yet they become “specters” (the word recurs again and again) who haunt each other, and for a reason neither of them knows as he leaves for East Germany, she won’t vanish from his life.In the world of the novel, specters multiply and never truly depart. Rock and roll. Levy, who has written plays for the BBC and the Royal Shakespeare Company, shifts registers deftly as different characters make cameo appearances at Adler’s bedside—or in his brain; we’re never quite sure. He will betray both Walter and Luna through carelessness — although perhaps his most irritating sin is neglecting to bring from the capitalist West the can of pineapple they desperately wanted as a present for Luna’s birthday.There are hints that Saul’s injuries from the car accident are more serious than he thought. His father, a London builder and lifelong Communist whose ashes Saul was carrying to East Berlin in a matchbox, is now sitting by his bed, smelling of canned mackerel and haranguing him about the wonders of the former German Democratic Republic, where workers were fed and housed: “That is why the state border had to be protected.” (Get back in your matchbox, we’re tempted to say.)
In stock. “For myself,” she has discovered, “it is the story of this hesitation that is the point of writing.” She’s fascinated by how her characters struggle to identify their long-held wishes, and why those wishes so often get derailed—all too often by specters, personal and political, who can’t be banished. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.”Identities, warped by morphine, double and resurge. Maris: Also, of course, the photo exhibit that Jennifer does that is inspired by Saul is called “A Man in Pieces.” That is also a very good description of what we see of Saul in the novel. The Man Who Saw Everything, Levy’s most stylistically complex novel yet, switches between present (London in 2016, the summer of the Brexit vote) and … Saul wonders, fearfully, if Wolfgang is the same driver who killed his mother in a car crash when Saul was 12. She gives Adler a background that brings geopolitical dramas home, quite literally, for him. Slipping in and out of consciousness, he is visited by real people and by specters—it can be hard to tell the difference—as he confronts his sense of being adrift in his own life and in history.