The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy - Blog Tour

• Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
• Published: 29/08/2019
• ISBN-13: 9780241268025
• Length: 208  Pages

Synopsis:In 1988 Saul Adler (a narcissistic, young historian) is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. He is apparently fine; he gets up and goes to see his art student girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. They have sex then break up, but not before she has photographed Saul crossing the same Abbey Road.

Saul leaves to study in communist East Berlin, two months before the Wall comes down. There he will encounter - significantly - both his assigned translator and his translator's sister, who swears she has seen a jaguar prowling the city. He will fall in love and brood upon his difficult, authoritarian father. And he will befriend a hippy, Rainer, who may or may not be a Stasi agent, but will certainly return to haunt him in middle age.

Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy's electrifying The Man Who Saw Everything examines what we see and what we fail to see, the grave crime of carelessness, the weight of history and our ruinous attempts to shrug it off.

Rating 3 ½ / 5

Review: Ii had some really mixed feelings about this book after putting it down. Perhaps I wasn't in the right head space to really appreciate it, but the biggest hurdle for me to really dig in and digest this novel was the the narrative. Switching between decades, blurring the lines between reality and Saul's idealised present, there were far too many additions in the narrative which I found hard to follow.

Having said this, perhaps this is a book meant to be enjoyed again and again, digging into each line and reference in greater depth. Looking back a few weeks later to write this, it's this exact reason that makes the book all the more interesting – I was left constantly second guessing my own interpretations and memory of events of the book, much like Saul.

One thing I did like in particular was the premise. Delving into carelessness, the harm we may do to others and how we may underestimate this was subtly done. Written in two parts, Saul's memory becomes increasingly questionable in the second, set in the modern day, as he recollects near-identical moments in the past and recalls events yet to happen, or at all, with certainty.

Overall, I found the novel to be quite hard to follow and a real struggle to finish, especially the first half. The second half attempts to make sense of the former, and I felt it did the job of highlighting just how Saul has been unable to shrug off events of his own past and live with the consequences. Beyond this, however, I wasn't really stirred by much else of the story. As much of it revolves around Saul's character development in lieu of a linear plot, I found him to be self-absorbed, incredibly draining as a result. I think this is definitely the sort of book that reveals something else on each reading, so i'll be open giving it another go.