The Man Who Saw Everything
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Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
An electrifying and audacious novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness by Deborah Levy, two-time Man Booker Prize finalist.
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--and this story of good intentions and reckless actions.
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.
About this Author
DEBORAH LEVY writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and widely translated. She is the author of several highly praised novels, including The Man Who Saw Everything (long-listed for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; and a three-part autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate. She lives in London and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reviews
Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
A Lambda Literary Award 2020 finalist
A CBC Best International Fiction of 2019 selection
One of The Sunday Times' (UK) "picks of the best paperbacks"
Praise for The Man Who Saw Everything:
"A Rubik's cube of a book . . . Ripe and rich . . . [Levy] is writing with gorgeous, juicy assurance here. It's stylish: written with a speedy, vivid economy, her characters' eccentricities leaping off the page. It's funny: Saul's narcissistic narration is full of deadpan details of youthful pretentiousness, social awkwardness. It's sexy: Levy writes keenly about layered attraction and resentment, how her characters bestow and withdraw gifts of sex and affection. And it's political: the novel exposes the hypocrisies that accompany rigid ideology, but also questions how an individual can live with integrity if they only live for themselves."
--The Independent
"Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page."
-Independent
"[Levy] loves to yank at our wiring, our orienting premises and prejudices . . . Her prose is light-handed and leaves a pleasant sting . . . Her rich, obsessional body of work is consumed by questions of how scripts--of gender, nationality, identity--paper over how fundamentally, how painfully, unknowable we are to ourselves, and the catastrophes that this blindness sets in motion."
--The New York Times
"The Man Who Saw Everything is a brilliantly constructed jigsaw puzzle of meaning that will leave readers wondering how much they can every truly know."
--The Washington Post
"Extraordinary . . . Levy's style is crisp, taut, even as she writes a dreamlike story."
--The Toronto Star
"Electrifying . . . The novel explores both what we see and what we miss until the past and present are staring directly at us."
--The Sunday Times
"There are lyrical passages about lake swimming, cold white wine and pasta restaurants in Soho alongside intense psychological probing of childhood, parental duty and sexual attraction. It's clever, raw, and it doesn't play by any rules."
--The London Evening Standard
"An innovative novel set in communist East Berlin. The personal and political histories entwine in a story of memory, loss and art."
--The Daily Telegraph
"Levy splices time in artfully believable, mesmerizing strokes."
-Lambda Literary
"Head-spinning and playful yet translucent, Levy's writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry. Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel."
--Kirkus (starred review)
"An eye-opening read . . . Against a backdrop in which surveillance and paranoia are rampant, Levy explores parallels between political and personal history, questions of trustworthiness, and the discrepancies between how we see ourselves and how we're seen by others . . . Levy's writing is playful, smart, and full of memorable lines."
--NPR
"[The Man Who Saw Everything] confirms Levy's rare--and ever more relevant--vision. In one short and sly book after another, she writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both . . . 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
"[In The Man Who Saw Everything] Levy is able to explode narrow ideas of sexuality, morality, and even time, exploring the vast possibilities of the human experience."
--BuzzFeed News, "The Best Books of 2019"
"An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel. . . . Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the [Booker] longlist."
-Daily Telegraph
"A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing. . . . Increasingly surreal and thoroughly gripping."
-Sunday Telegraph
"Exquisite. . . . A brilliant Booker nominee."
-The Guardian
"One of the big stories in English fiction this decade has been the return and triumph of Deborah Levy. . . . You would call her example inspiring if it weren't clearly impossible to emulate."
-New Statesman
"An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe."
-The Times
"Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious."
-Mail on Sunday
"Intelligent and supple. . . . [A] dizzying tale of life across time and borders."
-Financial Times
"Levy . . . is a master of the seemingly loose yet actually taut story. . . . 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
"Deborah Levy's novels are small masterworks of inlay, meticulously constructed. And The Man Who Saw Everything is perhaps her cleverest. . . . 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
"A work of philosophy and art. . . . Each [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
"Booker Prize-finalist Levy . . . explores the fragile connections and often vast chasms between self and others in this playful, destabilizing, and consistently surprising novel. . . . [The Man Who Saw Everything] brilliantly explores the parallels between personal and political history, and prompts questions about how one sees oneself-and what others see."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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
"Electrifying and profound . . . Deborah Levy's Booker-longlisted novel scrutinises the interior world of its characters with laser-like precision . . . Levy sets the standard for contemporary psychological narratives that are unflinching in their pursuit of truth."
--The Irish Times
"The Man Who Saw Everything [is] less a journey of discovery, a bildungsroman, than its opposite: a saga of unraveling. And that, in turn, gives the book 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."
--The New Republic
"[A] masterful story . . ."
--The Sunday Times (UK)
"Deborah Levy's haunting and effective novel The Man Who Saw Everything is like a beautiful shattered mirror. The reader (and Saul) have the impossible task of putting together that mirror in the second half. That's what makes it so ambiguous and uncomfortable and irresistible . . . How do we see ourselves? Do we see ourselves like others see us? The book provokes and shakes you up, shattering perception."
--The Associated Press
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